Is there some refugees are selling their personal documents via Facebook?

A German magazine reveals details of the case, which aroused great controversy

The Focus website published a report on the validity of German media reports on the sale and purchase of Arab refugees and their foreign travel passports, including those issued in Germany, by groups in Facebook.

A recent report in Bild newspaper, speaking of one of the groups, indicated that it was a closed group in which refugees sold their travel documents.

Focus magazine, the end of Bild’s report, asked how true it was.

To answer that, the website asked federal police, the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees and the Facebook administration.

The report revealed that the issue of refugees selling their German documents are really exist, pointing out that the first German media that talked about this was the “Der Spiegel” magazine, in a report published this spring.

The refugees sell or give their identities to others, adding that most of them are Syrian refugees who want to leave the EU and return to Syria by giving them their documents to their nationals in transit countries, such as Turkey or Greece, and some are offering their documents for sale in Facebook groups.

Among these groups, the German news agency DPA reported in a report a group of Arabic speakers, “reverse migration from Europe to Turkey”.

Focus website said the group was still available, and there were still leaflets to sell German passports, as well as regular publications, such as helping search for missing relatives.

“Facebook is working with law enforcement agencies around the world to crack down on illegal activities, such as trafficking in personal documents”, said a Facebook spokeswoman about the group in the latest Bild report, saying it had been reviewed and closed.

Smuggling of people or the activities of smuggling gangs on the social website.

According to the website, about 30,000 employees work on Facebook to track security issues and Facebook has invested in new technologies to better identify content that violates its policies.

The site pointed out that in Germany, individuals are prohibited from giving their personal documents to another person, if this is likely to lead to abuse, and even to do so the German law punishes the offense of misuse of personal documents, ranging from fine to imprisonment.

The federal government responded to a query from the parliamentary clique of the extremist party “Alternative for Germany” last March on the subject of the entry of asylum seekers to Germany with personal documents belonging to others.

“The federal government came to the knowledge of granting refugees or selling them documents Travel to other persons for illegal entry into Germany “.

The Bild newspaper said in its report that refugees’ access to documents belonging to other people was “increasingly repeated”, without elaborating on the meaning of the “increase” in numbers, but gave an example by saying that a “paper”, which did not specify its source, There are 554 such cases in 2017.

At the request of Focus website, the Federal Police confirmed that in 2017 cases of misuse of travel documents were limited to 555 cases, which meant that the documents were not forged, nor were they returned to the persons bearing them, adding that the documents included travel documents granted As well as other documents, and only 100 of them were issued by the German authorities.

The Federal Police added that this year, the figures reached a level similar to 2017, where the documents seized evening seized between January and November of 2018, 499 documents, including 97 documents issued by the German authorities.

Focus website has concluded that the problem exists and is known to the Federal Police, but the abuse of documents, according to the Bild report, is “increasingly frequent”, at least according to figures known to the German authorities.

The Focus website concluded with a response by the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) to its inquiry about the consequences for refugees entering Germany with forged or foreign documents, stating that it did not necessarily have to face the asylum application for the said category, However, this affects his or her asylum application “as an indication of the credibility of the applicant’s reasons for asylum”.

This does not mean that the false or false holder of documents will automatically be denied asylum.

On the contrary, in some cases, some refugees cannot leave their countries only by passports and the office stressed that it was legally binding to take into account the risks faced by asylum claimants in the said category, if their applications were rejected and therefore faced with deportation.