Israel police said on Sunday that they have detained a man suspected of taking hundreds of passport appointments and then illegally selling the time slots for cash.
Police said in a statement that the suspect is a 25-year-old resident of the Haredi town of Beitar Illit in the West Bank.
He is employed by a company that provides services to the Israel Institute for Biological Research in Ness Ziona. New Israeli passports issued are usually biometric.
Israel is facing a backlog of hundreds of thousands of people seeking to renew or obtain passports from the Interior Ministry. The impasse has created a chronic shortage of time slots, exacerbated by bad actors who used bots to sweep them up and then put them up for sale.
Police believe the suspect took advantage of computer systems at the institute to book hundreds of passport appointments, which were then sold to others. There is usually no fee to book an appointment at the Ministry of the Interior.
A secret investigation was launched a month ago after a security group from the Ministry of Defense gave a report to the police Lahav 433 National Crime Unit indicating a ban on Internet access at the Ness Ziona Institute. The two bodies then worked together on the matter.
The suspect was to be brought to the Rishon LeZion Magistrate’s Court for a remand hearing later in the day.
Last week, the interior ministry launched a month of extended office hours and services to deal with delays in obtaining passports, during which citizens can show up for passport services without an appointment.
With the inauguration of Operation Passport Marathon, long lines formed quickly In the four main Interior Ministry bureaus where it was offered – Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa and Beersheba.
For at least a year, various networks of hackers and bots have taken over thousands of appointments in the government’s online system and sold them for hundreds of thousands of dollars, causing a severe shortage of availability at Interior Ministry offices.
People who need to make appointments to renew their passports are often forced to wait months for an opening, especially in larger cities.
The current long wait times for passport appointments have their roots in the COVID-19 pandemic, during which international travel was severely curtailed, while the lockdown also limited both the government’s ability to issue new passports.
This created a backlog of an estimated one million passports that need renewal, causing all available appointments to be swiftly pushed out last year when pandemic restrictions were lifted. The issue has been exacerbated by companies and bots taking advantage of citizens’ desperation and booking appointments for sale.
