VZCZCXRO7204
RR RUEHGR
DE RUEHWN #0199/01 0311049
ZNR UUUUU ZZH
R 311049Z JAN 06
FM AMEMBASSY BRIDGETOWN
TO RUEHC/SECSTATE WASHDC 1775
RUEHPNH/NVC PORTSMOUTH 2232
INFO RUCNCOM/EC CARICOM COLLECTIVE

UNCLAS SECTION 01 OF 03 BRIDGETOWN 000199 
 
SIPDIS 
 
SIPDIS 
 
DEPT FOR CA/FPP, INL/HSTC; DEPT ALSO 
PASS TO KCC; POSTS FOR FRAUD PREVENTION 
MANAGERS 
 
E.O. 12958: N/A 
TAGS: KFRD CVIS CPAS CMGT ASEC KCRM BB
SUBJECT: FRAUD SUMMARY - BRIDGETOWN 
 
REF: 05 STATE 205073 
 
a. COUNTRY CONDITIONS: Embassy Bridgetown's consular 
district covers seventeen islands - seven independent 
countries, three British islands, four French islands 
and, for visa purposes, three Dutch islands.  The 
islands have widely varying levels of development that 
affect the level of fraud.  Barbados, with a strong 
economy based on tourism and financial services, has 
the lowest refusal rate and the lowest levels of 
fraud.  Refusal rates and levels of fraud are higher 
on other islands in the Eastern Caribbean, such as St. 
Lucia and Dominica, where the economies are less 
developed and unemployment is high. 
 
In the last few months, St. Vincent, St. Kitts and 
Nevis, and Dominica have started issuing machine- 
readable passports with digitized photos.  These 
passports are a significant improvement over the 
previous, non-machine readable versions with hand- 
written bio-data.  In our consular district, only St. 
Lucia and Antigua and Barbuda continue to issue non- 
machine readable passports with handwritten bio-data 
pages.  Barbados and Grenada have both issued machine- 
readable passports since 2004 and 2001, respectively. 
 
b. NIV FRAUD: Post has not detected significant fraud 
in any particular NIV category.  Most of the fraud 
encountered is the use of fake or padded job letters, 
bank statements, and other supporting documents by 
applicants for B1/B2 visas.  One area of concern is 
applicants from St. Lucia.  We have detected a 
disturbing increase of fraudulent documents from 
applicants from St. Lucia, including one verified case 
of an applicant with a fake backdated St. Lucian entry 
stamp.  There have also been reports of Guyanese 
nationals receiving fraudulent St. Lucian passports in 
order to travel visa-free to Canada. 
 
Another area of concern is the large number of third 
country nationals on the islands in our district, 
particularly Guyanese and Jamaicans in the British 
Virgin Islands, Dominicans in Dutch St. Maarten, and 
Haitians on the French islands of Martinique, 
Guadeloupe, and St. Martin.  These applicants have a 
higher refusal rate than our other applicants and, not 
surprisingly, are more prone to use fake documents 
when they apply.  Although many of these applicants 
are bona fide long-term residents of these islands, we 
have detected some fraudulent documents used by these 
third country nationals to exaggerate the length of 
their legal residence on these islands. 
 
At least two of the island states - St. Kitts and 
Nevis and Dominica - also have economic citizenship 
programs that allow third country nationals to buy 
local citizenship.  While not specifically fraudulent, 
these programs have raised concerns because the 
majority of those who take advantage of these programs 
are from countries of concern including the former 
Soviet Union and countries in the Middle East and East 
Asia. 
 
c. IV FRAUD:  Post has detected very few cases of IV 
fraud.  A small percentage of IV applicants are 
employment-based, and nearly all of them are nurses 
who are well qualified.  The vast majority of IV 
applicants are family-based, and most of those cases 
are straightforward.  The most problematic cases that 
we have encountered are spouses of U.S. citizens who 
have overstayed their visas or entered without 
inspection.  While most of these IR1 applicants admit 
to their illegal entry and overstay, some have used 
fraudulent means to conceal an overstay.  In one case, 
a St. Lucian applicant attempted to conceal her 3-year 
stay in the USVI with a fraudulent, backdated St. 
Lucian entry stamp.  At the interview, her story 
unraveled and she admitted to mailing her passport 
back to St. Lucia and paying someone to get a 
backdated entry stamp.  We have expressed our concern 
to the government of St. Lucia about the backdated 
entry stamps and the prevalence of fraudulent 
documents from St. Lucia. 
 
Post accepts relatively few IV petitions, generally in 
cases when the U.S. citizen petitioner is a resident 
of our consular district.  In one case, an American 
citizen who lived in Texas attempted to file an IV 
 
BRIDGETOWN 00000199  002 OF 003 
 
 
petition for his Cuban wife.  The petitioner had 
recently met his wife on the Internet and they were 
married in Jamaica just a few days before coming to 
Barbados.  The petitioner's passport showed recent 
travel to Korea and Russia, and he admitted that he 
had traveled there to see women whom he had also met 
on the Internet.  The consular officer refused to 
accept the petition because it was not clearly 
approvable.  Two weeks later, Barbados Immigration 
arrested the American citizen and his Cuban wife for 
attempting to leave Barbados with fake U.S. birth 
certificates and driver's licenses.  The U.S. citizen, 
who used to work at the Texas Department of Motor 
Vehicles, made a fake driver's license and birth 
certificate for himself to match his wife's.  Although 
Barbados Immigration eventually released the U.S. 
citizen, Post entered a lookout and notified DHS about 
his fraudulent activities. 
 
d. DV FRAUD: Post processed fewer than 10 DV cases in 
2005 and encountered no fraud. 
 
e. ACS AND PASSPORT FRAUD:  The vast majority of our 
passport applicants are children born in the U.S. to 
non-U.S. citizen mothers with tourist visas.  Post 
experienced a significant increase in passport 
applications in 2005, largely because consular 
officers and consular agents made regular visits to 
other islands to accept passport applications.  These 
consular visits have made it easier for American 
citizens on other islands to apply for passports, 
since they do not have to make an expensive trip to 
Barbados to appear before a consular officer.  The 
increase in passport applications from consular visits 
raised some concerns in CA/FPP about the possibility 
of non-U.S. citizens fraudulently applying for U.S. 
passports.  Post temporarily suspended the consular 
visits while consulting with CA/FPP on fraud- 
prevention measures.  Post recently resumed the visits 
and incorporated a number of CA/FPP suggestions, 
including requiring applicants to make an appointment 
in advance and no longer using consular agents (who 
can accept but not approve applications) for consular 
visits to other islands. 
 
Post has detected a few cases of applicants making a 
false claim to U.S. citizenship.  In one case, a young 
Guyanese applicant claimed to be a U.S. citizen who 
lost his passport.  His story fell apart when he could 
not remember the name of the school he attended in New 
York and said that he "sat for the SAT exam".  Post 
contacted Barbados immigration, which confirmed that 
he was living illegally in Barbados and deported him. 
 
f. ADOPTION FRAUD:  Post only processes about 15-20 
adoption cases a year, although these cases are 
sometimes problematic because the U.S. citizen 
petitioner adopts a relative and the adopted child 
does not meet the definition of orphan.  For example, 
one adoption case was refused when it was discovered 
that the 14-year-old "orphan" was actually living with 
her biological mother in Grenada.  Most of these 
adoptions take place not in Barbados but on other 
islands in our district, making it very difficult for 
consular officers to conduct a field investigation. 
To classify a child as an orphan in these cases, we 
rely on documentation from a competent authority in 
the country where the adoption takes place.  This 
documentation usually consists of a letter from a 
court, welfare officer, or social worker that the 
biological parent is not capable of providing proper 
care and has irrevocably released the child for 
adoption and emigration. 
 
g. ASYLUM AND OTHER DHS BENEFITS FRAUD:  Post has not 
processed any asylum cases.  In 2005, Post issued 72 
boarding letters to LPRs with lost, stolen, or expired 
green cards.  In these cases, we routinely verify with 
DHS that the applicant is an LPR.  We detected one 
case involving an Antiguan man with a fake expired 
green card who applied for a boarding letter.  After 
DHS verified that the A number on his green card 
belonged to a Brazilian woman, we denied the boarding 
letter and entered a P6C hit on the applicant. 
 
h. COOPERATION WITH HOST GOVERNMENT AUTHORITIES: With 
a consular district spanning many islands, Post is 
hard-pressed to maintain close contacts with host 
 
BRIDGETOWN 00000199  003 OF 003 
 
 
government authorities.  Our closest contacts are with 
Barbadian authorities, which generally take fraud 
matters seriously and have cooperated with the Embassy 
on a number of cases. They have also expressed 
interest in receiving specific USG training to detect 
fraudulent documentation because of the increasing 
numbers of eastern Europeans and others they perceive 
using Barbados as a launching point for entry into the 
U.S. and Canada.  Government authorities on the other, 
less-prosperous islands have limited resources for 
fighting fraud and illegal migration.  For example, 
cash-strapped Dominica allows Haitians to enter 
Dominica by paying a $400 bond that can be refunded 
when they exit the country legally.  Dominican 
authorities acknowledge that the vast majority of 
Haitians never collect their bond because they leave 
Dominica by boat to illegally enter the nearby French 
islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique.  Of the more 
than 11,000 Haitians who have entered Dominica since 
the program started in 2003, only about 100 have 
collected their bond. 
 
i. AREAS OF PARTICULAR CONCERN: Given the proximity of 
Caribbean islands to the U.S. and lax immigration 
controls on some of the islands, it is not surprising 
to hear reports of alien smugglers and economic 
migrants using the islands as transit points to the 
U.S.  Post has encountered a few cases that lend 
credence to these reports.  In the summer of 2005, two 
applicants from Ghana applied for transit visas, 
claiming they needed to transit Miami to travel to 
Belize for work.  They had traveled from Ghana to 
Moscow to Jamaica to Barbados, a travel pattern 
consistent with alien smuggling.  More recently, Post 
received a request for an emergency visa appointment 
for 10 Mongolians who said they needed to transit the 
U.S. on their way from Grenada to Mongolia.  They 
claimed to represent the Mongolia-Grenada Cooperation 
Society, although the two countries seem to have no 
diplomatic or economic relations and no reason to have 
a cooperation society.  Post granted their request for 
an early appointment (partly to investigate possible 
fraud), but the Mongolians could not come for the 
interview because Barbados immigration denied their 
entry to Barbados. 
 
We consistently hear reports throughout the region of 
alien smuggling via private boats.  Most are 
attempting to reach the USVI.  One American citizen 
was arrested last year when a French naval vessel 
discovered illegal drugs and 7 aliens from St. Vincent 
on his boat near Guadeloupe.  Just last week, a 
sailboat with approximately 10 Cubans onboard was 
discovered in St. Martin. 
 
j. STAFFING AND TRAINING: The section does not have a 
formal FPU.  Because of staffing shortages, the FPU 
Chief position is temporarily filled by IV Chief Scott 
Urbom.  When the section is fully staffed, the FPU 
Chief typically devotes 50% of his time to NIV 
interviews.  Post does not have any LES devoted to the 
FPU but occasionally uses NIV FSNs to call to verify 
documents.  We are working to develop a more effective 
FPU and considering hiring an LES fraud investigator. 
We have also requested funds to conduct an initial 
validation study. 
 
KRAMER