VZCZCXRO9272
RR RUEHDBU RUEHLN RUEHSK RUEHVK RUEHYG
DE RUEHYE #0834/01 3411209
ZNR UUUUU ZZH
R 071209Z DEC 09
FM AMEMBASSY YEREVAN
TO RUEHC/SECSTATE WASHDC 9794
RUEHPNH/NVC PORTSMOUTH NH 0483
RUCNCIS/CIS COLLECTIVE
RUEHFT/AMCONSUL FRANKFURT 1969

UNCLAS SECTION 01 OF 05 YEREVAN 000834 
 
DEPT FOR CA/FPP - (RSBILLINGS) AND CA/VO/KCC 
DEPT PASS TO KCC WILLIAMSBURG FOR FPM (JSCHOOLS) 
NVC FOR FPM (BAUSTIN) 
FRANKFURT FOR RCO (KBROUGHAM) 
POSTS FOR CONS 
 
SIPDIS 
 
E.O. 12958: N/A 
TAGS: KFRD CVIS CPAS CMGT ASEC AM
SUBJECT: SEMI-ANNUAL FRAUD SUMMARY (MARCH 2009 - AUGUST 2009)- 
YEREVAN 
 
REF: (A) 2008 YEREVAN 775 (B) 07 SECSTATE 171211 
 
¶1. (SBU) Armenia remains a high-fraud post.  While consular staff 
members periodically uncover fraud rings and other organized plots, 
post's interviewing officers deal with small-scale fraud every day. 
Due to widespread document fraud, including birth and marriage 
certificates as well as passports and work documents, consular 
officers at post cannot rely on documentation during visa 
interviews.  The Sixth Department of the National Police, which 
combats organized crime, cooperates actively with Post in cases of 
document fraud. 
 
COUNTRY CONDITIONS 
------------------ 
 
¶2. (U) The international financial crisis has affected Armenia. 
Armenia's official unemployment rate for 2008 was 6.3 percent, and 
from January-August 2009 it rose to 6.8 percent.  However, according 
to household surveys conducted in line with International Labor 
Organization methodology, actual unemployment for 2008 was estimated 
to be around 28 percent, and much higher in the provinces and among 
women.  The strong GDP growth of recent years, driven primarily by 
construction in Yerevan, has evaporated and Armenia's GDP is 
projected to decline by about 15 percent in 2009, with zero growth 
expected in 2010.  As a consequence, the percentage of people living 
in poverty is quite high.  Many Armenians depend on remittances from 
family members abroad, particularly in Russia followed by the United 
States.  The global economic crisis, however, has significantly 
reduced remittances and workers who used to make the annual trip to 
Russia to work in construction (legally or illegally) for 6-8 months 
per year did not return there in 2009.  Consequently, foreign 
remittances are down some 30%, according to the International 
Monetary Fund. An estimated 1.5 million Armenians have left the 
country since 1990.  About one-third of Armenians live in rural 
areas, many of them as subsistence farmers.  The average salary in 
Yerevan amounted to USD 318 per month in July 2009. The average 
salary in Armenia in July 2009 was USD 293 and the estimate for 
August is USD 267. 
 
NIV FRAUD 
--------- 
 
¶3. (U) Much of the document fraud seen in NIV interviews is 
unsophisticated and easy to detect.  Occasionally, we find more 
serious cases where applicants obtain legitimately issued second 
passports, sometimes with different names or dates of birth, an 
alternate spelling of the last name, or a new name altogether to 
support a mala fide persona.  Applicants also can acquire either 
genuine but fraudulently obtained or high-quality counterfeit 
documents such as birth, marriage and divorce certificates. Post has 
had success in referring such cases to the Sixth Department of the 
National Police for prosecution.  Genuine but fraudulently obtained 
diplomas and other education documents are easily available for 
those who need to prove credentials (e.g. for DV applicants). 
Back-dated reentry stamps are easy to purchase from border guards. 
With access to ADIS, post continues to detect ever more instances of 
applicants hiding overstays through purchase of back-dated reentry 
stamps. To date we have seen a decline in these cases to only four 
in the reporting period.  Most primary and supporting documentation 
is suspect, and officers cannot rely on them in making visa 
decisions. 
 
¶4. (SBU) Individuals providing visa advice and services that fill 
out forms for applicants continue to be a source of fraud and 
disinformation.  One applicant, after finally admitting that she had 
overstayed, related that one notorious consultant had told her that 
she should hide this ineligibility if she wanted to receive a visa. 
In immigrant visa cases, virtually all cases of contrived contacts 
are the work of one visa form filler-slash-translator who fills out 
the DS-230 immigrant visa application forms. 
 
¶5. (SBU) Post uses its Accurint account several times a week and has 
found it very helpful in vetting NIV petition visas, IV cases, and 
sometimes ACS cases.  Officers and the fraud investigator can follow 
up on leads generated by the Lexis-Nexis reports and thus better 
judge the accuracy of information submitted by petitioners and 
applicants. This allows interviewing officers to render decisions 
more quickly and confidently and to better support recommendations 
for petition revocation. 
 
¶6. (SBU) Post daily confirms NIV applicants' actual exit from the 
U.S. using our ADIS account provided by CA/FPP.  ADIS has become a 
powerful tool for discovering fraud, albeit the records only appear 
to be accurate as of 2003. 
 
YEREVAN 00000834  002 OF 005 
 
 
 
IV FRAUD 
-------- 
 
¶7. (SBU) Yerevan has been processing immigrant visas since 2006 and 
fraud is a part of a significant percentage of family-based 
immigrant visa applications, especially in K-1 fiancee visa cases. 
Most fraudulent cases involve applicants with relatives in the 
United States who themselves either overstayed B1B2 visas or lodged 
questionable asylum cases in the U.S.  These relatives have arranged 
sham marriages for IV beneficiaries in an attempt to reunify their 
family.  In the reporting period, post returned for possible 
revocation approximately eight percent of our almost 1,000 IV 
(excluding DV) visas issued. 
 
¶8. (SBU) Lexis-Nexis has been very helpful in providing leads for 
investigation of fraud in instances of sham spouses, or their 
follow-on step-children.  We frequently find American citizen 
petitioners continuing to live with their "ex"-spouses, or not 
cohabitating with their new spouse. 
 
DV FRAUD 
-------- 
 
¶9. (SBU) We occasionally discover fraudulent documents in DV 
applications, usually intended to support the addition of 
derivatives (birth or marriage documents), or - to a much lesser 
degree - demonstrate adequate labor qualifications, i.e. vocational 
school diplomas for those who didn't finish high school.  Overall 
fraud in our DV workload appears to be much less of a problem than 
in CR1 and K-1 IV categories.  In the reporting period, only a 
couple DV cases were refused for failure to qualify for the DV 
lottery due to fraudulent documents. 
 
¶10. (SBU) Post continues to notice a significant number of 
inexplicable data entry mistakes for biographic information in DV 
winners' registration for the DV lottery.  This is not just in cases 
where a third party in the U.S., who doesn't really know the 
beneficiaries, has registered their entry.  Post suspects, but has 
no proof, that these cases might represent instances where 
beneficiaries deliberately register multiple times for the DV 
lottery using slight derivations of their date of birth.  These 
cases may have somehow managed to bypass Facial Recognition checks. 
In general, Armenians rely to an extraordinary degree on relatives 
in the U.S. or third parties, usually unscrupulous form fillers 
known to provide false or misleading advice, to register for the DV 
lottery. This continues to be the case even though the DV 
instructions are posted in Armenian on post's website and post's 
annual outreach on DV issues focuses on the importance of proper 
data entry. 
 
ACS AND U.S. PASSPORT FRAUD 
--------------------------- 
 
¶11. (U) There appears to be much less fraud in our ACS workload 
compared to our IV and NIV workload.  In the past, we have 
occasionally had questionable CRBA applications centering on the 
U.S. citizen's actual paternity, resp. ability to transmit 
citizenship.  To date, most such dodgy CRBA cases have been resolved 
with DNA testing.  During this reporting period, no cases of ACS 
fraud were recorded. 
 
ADOPTION FRAUD 
-------------- 
 
¶12. (U) To be eligible for adoption in Armenia, a child must be 
legally abandoned by all living parents through a renunciation of 
parental rights, or found to be an orphan by the state. Death 
certificates of both parents, court decisions or police statements 
(in cases of a foundling child) also may serve as evidence of a 
child's orphaned status. Orphaned children become the custody of 
orphanages and the Ministry of Labor and Social Issues maintains the 
centralized registration and has the list of children available for 
adoption.    For the first three months on this list, a child may be 
adopted only by Armenians; after three months have elapsed, a child 
may be adopted by Armenians or foreigners. 
 
¶13. (SBU) Corruption on the part of Armenian government officials, 
adoption agencies and orphanages is a concern, and due to pervasive 
document fraud, local birth and identity documents are often not 
reliable.  However, during this reporting period, none of the cases 
we have seen have included fraudulent documents.  In addition to 
field investigations, post combats adoption fraud by running 
background checks on all local adoption facilitators, whom post 
 
YEREVAN 00000834  003 OF 005 
 
 
still works with on legacy I-601 adoption cases. 
 
¶14. (SBU) Armenia is officially a signatory to the Hague Convention 
on Inter-Country Adoptions, and all adoption cases begun after April 
2008 are processed in accordance with the Hague. The Ministry of 
Justice has been designated at the Central Authority under the Hague 
Convention for Adoptions and Child Abductions and its Department of 
Civil Acts Registration is responsible for carrying out day-to-day 
operations.  A new regulation on adoptions has been cleared with all 
governmental agencies involved in the adoption process (the Ministry 
of Labor and Social Issues, the Ministry of Health, the MFA, Police, 
etc.) and is due to be enacted. The new regulation will reportedly 
bring Armenia into compliance with Hague Convention requirements, 
and include the implementing regulations for the execution of the 
Hague Convention's Article 16 and 23 letters. It will replace 
regulations which currently govern the adoption process in Armenia 
and will include clear guidance on the operational steps and 
implementation deadlines for each Armenian Government agency. 
 
USE OF DNA TESTING 
------------------ 
 
¶15. (U) Until September 2009, when the Department released new 
worldwide guidance on DNA testing, DNA testing in Yerevan was done 
remotely with Embassy panel physicians drawing samples at their 
office and then sending the samples to accredited labs in the U.S. 
for analysis.  A Consular Officer would witness the sampling, 
maintain chain of custody, and forward it to the U.S. lab.  Results 
were sent directly to the Embassy via DHL, generally within three to 
four weeks.  In the reporting period, post conducted one DNA test in 
accordance with the former procedure.  Since September 2009, post 
has briefed its panel physicians on the new process for DNA testing, 
to be done at the Consular Section, and is ready to implement the 
new procedures. 
 
¶16. (U) Post also encounters suspected relationship fraud in 
Diversity Visa and family-based Immigrant Visa cases, usually in 
marriage or fiance visa cases.  To date, DNA testing has not been 
used in such cases.  In one typical case, the petitioner and 
beneficiary volunteered to submit to DNA testing of their supposed 
child in common to bolster their claims of being a bona fide couple. 
  Where DNA testing has been employed, post is generally satisfied 
with its current operational procedures. 
 
ASYLUM AND OTHER DHS BENEFIT FRAUD 
---------------------------------- 
 
¶17. (SBU) Post is exposed to asylum fraud in two ways. One way is 
through anecdotal evidence supplied by NIV applicants whose 
relatives went to the United States on non-immigrant visas and 
claimed asylum. When applicants volunteer information during visa 
interviews on their family member's status in the U.S. as an asylee 
or refugee, they have offered all kinds of reasons to justify their 
relatives' applications for asylum, including, "She couldn't find a 
job here" and the ever-popular, "He got sick." 
 
¶18. (SBU) The second way in which post encounters asylum fraud is 
through the processing of Visas 92/93 following-to-join cases.  Post 
assumed a large backlog of V92 cases from Moscow in late 2007.  In 
early FY2009, Post experienced a spike in V92 issuances after 
Armenia removed its onerous and time-consuming de-registration 
requirement in November 2008.  Our V92 volume swelled at the 
beginning of FY2009 and has now become a trickle. While the IV 
Unit's role in these cases is to verify the relationship of the 
following-to-join asylee only, due to the prevalence of fraudulent 
documents and fraudulently-obtained authentic documents in Armenia, 
consular officers often must review the petitioner's I-589 
application for asylum statement and verify the relationship not 
only on the basis of civil documents, but based on shared 
experiences between petitioner and beneficiaries. Often the 
beneficiary is unable to corroborate their relationship to the 
beneficiary through shared experiences. In these cases, the 
beneficiary may tell completely contradictory information regarding 
major life events such as travel abroad, work history, 
hospitalizations or arrests. As a result, the consular officer must 
assume that either the beneficiary is not related to the petitioner 
as stated on their application or (more likely) that the underlying 
grounds for asylum are specious. In cases where the consular officer 
suspects asylum fraud, the officer drafts a cable reporting these 
suspicions to USCIS/ICE for further investigation. 
 
¶19. (SBU) In the past, Post has seen DHS travel documents (re-entry 
permits) that appear to have been issued to aliens when they were 
not in the United States, usually persons who received asylum or 
 
YEREVAN 00000834  004 OF 005 
 
 
refugee status including their derivative family members.  The 
applications for these documents usually have been filed by 
relatives and initially sent to the relatives' addresses in the 
U.S., from whence they are forwarded to the alien in Armenia. Often 
these cases involve questions by travel document holders on how to 
extend reentry permits or applications for U.S. passports for 
children born to Armenian asylees/refugees in the U.S., who have 
spent considerable amounts of time in Armenia since receiving such 
status.  We refer all such cases to the DHS/USCIS office at Embassy 
Moscow. 
 
 
ALIEN SMUGGLING, TRAFFICKING, ORGANIZED CRIME, 
TERRORIST TRAVEL 
--------------------------------------------- - 
 
¶20. (SBU) Due to its high unemployment and significant poverty, 
Armenia is a source for illegal travel.  In recent years, Yerevan's 
fraud unit has uncovered two large alien smuggling efforts using 
approved P-3 petitions.  The fraud unit's investigations resulted in 
permanent Class I ineligibilities entered against each group's local 
organizer.  At post, any group petition is suspected of having one 
or two "ringers" and consular officers must vigilantly check the 
qualifications of all group applicants.  Organized crime is present 
in Armenia and particularly active in monopoly sectors such as fuel 
and energy. 
 
DS CRIMINAL FRAUD INVESTIGATIONS 
-------------------------------- 
 
¶21. (U) The Consular Section maintains good working relations with 
the Embassy RSO, and the ARSO/I position Post requested has been 
approved by DS and CA and is awaiting funding.  The addition of this 
position will strengthen and expand post's anti-fraud program.  The 
Consular Section regularly informs the RSO of cases referred to the 
Police's 6th Department for Organized Crime Combat for further 
investigation and prosecution. 
 
HOST COUNTRY PASSPORT, IDENTITY DOCUMENTS, 
CIVIL REGISTRY 
----------------------------------------- 
 
¶22. (SBU) Post frequently encounters fraudulent or illegally 
obtained original documents, ranging from municipally-issued civil 
documents to passports.  Yerevan's anti-fraud unit has identified 
fraudulent documents manufactured in Armenia, Russia and the United 
States according to applicants' own statements.  Local forgers are 
put in contact with potential clients via word-of-mouth and 
"connections" (often in Moscow), while fraudulently obtained 
original documents are available for small bribes from local 
municipal authorities. Original Armenian passports with altered 
information reportedly can be had for several thousand U.S. dollars 
at one of Armenia's over 80 passport issuing agencies.  Used 
passports for photo-substitution reportedly cost a similar amount. 
The fact that there is no centralized database which civil 
registries can use facilitates document fraud. 
 
¶23. (SBU) Armenian authorities have issued machine-readable 
passports since 1995.  In 2000, Armenia began issuing a new machine 
readable passport with improved photo security measures.  The 1995 
passports, which are vulnerable to photo substitutions, remain valid 
and with extensions may be in circulation through 2015.  Post 
learned recently that Armenian authorities hope to issue a tender 
for their new ICAO-compliant electronic passport by year's end and 
have the first new passports within eight months from the date the 
contract is awarded.  Post's Export Control and Border Security 
Program (INL) also funded purchase of a new passport printer for the 
Armenian MFA in the reporting period.  Armenian Border Guards use 
the Border Management Information System (BMIS) to check passports 
of persons entering Armenia. BMIS includes a database of scanned 
passports and the Government of Armenia maintains a watch list of 
persons of interest. 
 
COOPERATION WITH HOST GOVERNMENT AUTHORITIES 
-------------------------------------------- 
 
¶24. (SBU) We normally forward cases involving fraudulent government 
documents to the Armenian National Police's 6th Department, the 
division tasked with fighting organized crime, and have found them 
quite receptive to conducting active investigations.  During the 
reporting period, Post referred three cases where we suspected that 
entry stamps in applicants' passports were genuine, but illicitly 
obtained.  Our contacts investigated, but were required to pass the 
cases to the National Security Service (the former Armenian KGB) as 
 
YEREVAN 00000834  005 OF 005 
 
 
they have jurisdiction over the border guards.  While we have yet to 
receive a report on the status of those cases, we heard that several 
border guards were fired and the number of genuine, but illicitly 
obtained stamps has declined significantly. 
 
¶25. (SBU) Under Armenian law, forgery is punishable by a fine, one 
year's "correctional labor" or up to two years in prison.  Using 
false documents with the intent to cross a state border is subject 
to up to three years in prison.  Though we referred several cases of 
false documents to the National Security Service (NSS), it appears 
that some known forgers and document dealers have protection within 
the Armenian government. 
 
AREAS OF PARTICULAR CONCERN 
--------------------------- 
 
¶26. (SBU) Post continues to receive an unusually high number of 
requests from ICE attorneys for document verification or 
translations of visa applications for persons applying for 
immigration benefits in the U.S.  This is a labor-intensive task 
which occupies a significant part of our fraud investigator's time. 
Until recently, document verification requests were usually 
channeled through the USCIS Attache's office at Embassy Moscow. 
Post now receives the majority of such requests from DRL in the 
Department.  Requests for visa applications usually come directly 
from Assistant Chief Counsels in Los Angeles and usually end up as a 
subsequent request for document verification related to an asylum 
application.  At any one time, post has some 30 pending 
investigations with an average of two new investigations requests 
and five visa application requests received each week.  The majority 
of these investigations confirm that the submitted documentation is 
fraudulent.  Post has developed a Microsoft Access database to track 
these cases and, more importantly, quantify the resources spent on 
these investigations.  We believe this information would be 
invaluable to CA/EX to request partial DHS/ICE funding of our FSNI's 
position who spends some 40-50% of his time on DHS investigations. 
 
STAFFING AND TRAINING 
--------------------- 
 
¶27. (U) Embassy Yerevan's FPU consists of Consular Section Chief 
Robert Farquhar who serves also as Fraud Prevention Manager (FPM) 
and a full-time FSN fraud analyst/investigator (Armen Alaverdian). 
The fraud analyst also serves as an interpreter during IV and NIV 
interviewing and screens applicants for likely imposters.  The fraud 
analyst attended FSI's fraud course for FSNs in 2003, the 2006 Fraud 
Conference in Istanbul, and completed the online courses PC 544 and 
PC 128 as well (as have all consular staff). 
 
YOVANOVITCH