Can you buy any genuine passport under the table for a cheap price,?
Passports, as a general rule, are produced by the same manufacturing facility which prints a countrys paper currency, and the technology which goes into printing passports is similar. One time when I was in Ottawa at a conference the instructor came into the lecture hall to announce he had a trat for us - he had secured permission for our class to tour the manufacturing plant where Canadian passports were produced. Turned out it was an actual underground factory (like something out of a James Bond movie) and security was extremely tight. They ran us through the stages in printing up Canadian passports - the special paper, how the pages were sewn together, the special thread for that, the 6 different methods of printing used, all manner of hidden security features most people wouldnt even be aware of (they had to tell us, because as Immigration Officers we worked the front line and were the individuals charged with the task of detecting fraud) To illustrate the sort of thing most people dont seem to know, microprinting is a basic security feature used worldwide by many different countries. Get a passport and a powerful magnifying glass and examine the lines in the passport (say, the line where you sign your name, if your countrys passports still have such a feature) . Frequently, that apparently solid line is actually made up of very, very tiny printed letters spelling out the name of the country, or repeating the national slogan, etc. Thats an old security feature, but still commonly used because its relatively cheap to do (compared to the latest security features) and easy to detect if done incorrectly (most counterfeit passports are printed using ink jet printers, and they dont have the resolution to print that small, that clearly). Nowadays, the passports of most advanced countries are machine readable, so the port of entry officer just has to swipe the passport youve presented and if youre trying to enter using a passport reported stolen, that inconvenient fact will come up immediately - good thing youre trying to get in at an airport, because most airports have jail cells to hold you in until the police come to collect you. Passport security has gone way past the stage where some forger in a back alley is able to produce a credible product. I have no doubt that professional intelligence agencies are able to generate high quality fraudulent passports - the Russian FSB, the American CIA, the British MI6, the Israeli Mossad, the Chinese IDCPC - all are no doubt capable of producing excellent quality counterfeit passports. However, fraudulent travel documents are no longer something a cottage industry is capable of producing.