ACCRA, GHANA — The U.S. State Department recently uncovered a criminal operation in Ghana that had been passing off a ramshackle building in the capital as the country’s official embassy.
The sham embassy was housed in a battered pink building with a U.S. flag. With white people manning the inside and a photo of Obama on the wall, most assumed it was legit.
According to a U.S. Department of State statement, the consular officers were Turkish citizens who spoke English and Dutch and were working with organized Ghanaian crime rings. Instead of getting clients nearby, they advertised via flyers and billboards to customers in remote parts of West Africa.
Clients were shuttled to the city, booked at a nearby hotel and taken to and from the fake embassy, which was open three mornings a week. Walk-ins were not accepted.
For a fee of $6,000, applicants could be issued fraudulently obtained but legitimate U.S. visas, or any other false identification documents they needed.
The scheme went on for a decade until the real U.S. embassy caught on, leading to the arrest of several suspects via police raid. Some others were able to escape, but authorities have already gotten warrants and are planning to pursue them.
More than a hundred passports, legitimate and counterfeit visas and documents were also found in the investigation, along with the discovery of another fake embassy — this one for the Netherlands.
