While the Greek capital has for decades been “an international supermarket of false documents”, the current migrant crisis has vastly exacerbated the problem, he added. Every day, Greek police find up to 200 fake IDs, “most of them of poor quality”, at Athens airport, a European security expert told AFP speaking on condition of anonymity.

It was a lot harder for him to blend in,” he said. “My brother hadn’t left Syria before and didn’t know how to navigate the airport. Before the Syrian war broke out four years ago, Ali had been through airports dozens of times and speaks perfect English. “He was very upset that I left him at the airport, but what could I do, turn back and give myself up? I was really sad, but I had to keep going,” he said. His older brother, who paid 100 Euros ($114) for his Spanish forgery, wasn’t so lucky-he was caught out and would end up making the 3,000-kilometre journey to the Netherlands by land. He caught a flight from Crete airport-“where security is lower than Athens”-to Paris, and then a train to The Hague.

In April Ali used the ID, which carried his picture but was in the name of someone called Marco Rossi. It’s humiliating,” he said, speaking to AFP through the Viber phone app from his new home. You have to beg them to get what you want. “All along, you know they’re cheating you, but you can’t say anything. Yet dealing with gangsters like “The Whale”, Ali warned, was also risky and cost him his dignity. The rush to Europe has fuelled a massive demand for fake IDs among people like Ali-not his real name-who already risked their lives once to reach Greece from Turkey on inflatable boats. Unlike tens of thousands of other refugees and migrants, he was able to avoid the perilous, exorbitantly-priced land journey through the Balkans and central Europe, all thanks to “The Whale”. “It turns out the guy I’d been speaking to, who sounded so big and scary on the phone, was actually tiny,” said 31-year-old Ali, now living as a refugee in The Hague which he reached by plane several months ago using a forged Italian identity card that cost him just 30 Euros ($34). PARIS: Ali, a Palestinian-Syrian banker desperate to reach the Netherlands, had to hide his surprise when he finally met a shadowy forger known as “The Whale” at an Arab-style shisha cafe near Athens.

A man sits with a young girl wrapped in a blanket on the shore after arriving with other refugees and migrants on the Greek island

Fake french national id card