Romanian Citizenship by Descent Fraud and How to Avoid Getting Caught in Citizenship Scams

Feb 25, 2026 | Residency & Citizenship by Investment

Thousands of people were discovered partaking in fraudulent Romanian passport acquisition.

I too was offered such a Romanian passport. I also had a chance to obtain a Central African passport once upon a time.

I share these experiences and also elaborate on the seldom discussed risks associated with such “low-key” citizenship by exception programs, as opposed to formal citizenship by investment schemes.

https://youtu.be/-0Od9YkOJG4?si=DD7vRFiIiiC2oVY4

Romanian Citizenship by Descent Fraud and How to Avoid Getting Caught in Citizenship Scams (https://youtu.be/-0Od9YkOJG4?si=DD7vRFiIiiC2oVY4)

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Transcript of “Romanian Citizenship by Descent Fraud and How to Avoid Getting Caught in Citizenship Scams”

LADISLAS MAURICE: Big scandal in Romania, the government did an audit and found out that tens of thousands of people obtained Romanian citizenship through fraudulent means. So we’ll be discussing what happened and then most importantly, what are the key lessons for this if you’re someone that is considering applying for a citizenship by investment or exception or descent.

Fraudulent citizenship by descent in Romania

So what happened? Essentially the scheme was relatively simple. Romania has a citizenship by descent program whereby if you hail from the Kingdom of Romania, which was much bigger 100 years ago, the loophole is that back then Romania encompassed parts of modern day Moldova and parts of modern day Ukraine. This led to some fraudulent service providers creating fake ancestors for applicants. Most of the applicants were Russian and Ukrainian.

Why? As a Russian or Ukrainian client, they would source an original Soviet birth certificate that was blank and then they would backfill all the details and create a great-grandfather or great-grandmother that was born in what was Romania back then and is now Ukraine. And it was very believable for Russians, for Ukrainians because during the Soviet times, there were a lot of population movements. So people would then submit these documents and then go through a one to two year process and then eventually obtain Romanian citizenship and then get a Romanian passport along with it that gave them full access to the Schengen area, not just for traveling but also for living.

So obviously this was very popular. It was being sold on social media quite a lot. Prices range from 4,000 to 15,000 euros, depending on who the service provider was. And in some cases they would even offer it to people that did not have any Romanian origins such as myself. Back then I inquired out of curiosity, I mean it was clearly a fraud to understand how it worked and because I don’t have any Eastern European origins in spite of my first name, we can say that your great-great-grandfather was born in that specific part of Odessa district, which was back then Romania, and then because Odessa district is known for always having been a trading hub, especially back then it was very multicultural, it could be plausible that your great-great-grandfather was naturalized or born there.

Obviously they wanted more money for my case. The whole thing was not very serious, so that was their story. for me it would have been more expensive as a non-Eastern European. I just wanted to get more information on it because I geek out on these things.

What do Romanian police do about fraudulent passports

The Romanian authorities found out about it and now they are backtracking, they’re going back, they’re doing more audits and they’re trying to find out everyone that went through this process and they’re going to be canceling all these passports.

So there are now tens of thousands of Russians and Ukrainians and possibly other people as well that think they have a Romanian passport, that think they can travel freely and they can, and then suddenly they’ll get cut off. So imagine you’ve obtained it fraudulently and you’re now living in Europe under that identity, you have a problem. You have a major problem. You’ll probably have to leave. Imagine if you had a slightly different name and you opened various bank accounts, you can’t show proof of citizenship anymore. A lot of people will have major problems, especially Ukrainians that were fleeing the draft.

Many of them did this. They went to Europe and then from Europe applied for this program so that they could travel around freely if their Ukrainian passports were expired and they couldn’t go around and couldn’t get it renewed. So a lot of people are going to have a lot of problems.

How to avoid citizenship scams

So what are some of the key lessons? I mean the first one is if it’s too good to be true, it probably is. If you’re being offered that you can get citizenship for 5,000 or 10,000 dollars, or if you’re being told that you can get citizenship in some EU country for 10,000 to 30,000 dollars and we’ll just create you a fake great-grandfather and everything’s fine, it’s probably a fraud. There’s a ton of ads on Instagram, Facebook, social media, etc. promoting these schemes for a few different countries. So that’s one of the lessons.

And I think I really want people to understand this one. In the age of social media, in the age of ever-increasing greed, whenever there’s a bit of a loophole, it’s going to be abused.

You know, it’s not like the 90s where you could potentially pay and get a citizenship and there was no real way to scale it. Now if there is such a scheme, immediately people run with it and start promoting it and try to make as much money as quickly as possible and then eventually the thing just hits the wall and then people get caught.

Hungary had such a program going on for quite a while. There were a lot of people obtaining Hungarian citizenship fraudulently. The Hungarian government never officially admitted to having this issue. What they did quite simply was they put all of these passports on an internal red list and whenever you would fly into Hungary with this passport, they would just take it from you and send you back. But if you entered the European Union through Poland or through France or Germany or whatever, the Hungarians did not tell the other governments that these passports were not obtained legally and you could still travel around. But then when you tried to renew it, that’s when they would catch you. So essentially people thought they bought citizenship, but in fact they just bought a passport with an expiry date.

Problems with citizenship by exception schemes

And this brings me to the topic of some of these citizenship by exception programs out there. People call them now citizenship by exception because they’re not official citizenship by investment. There are a few countries that sell them, a few in Africa, a few in Europe on the fringes of the European Union and supposedly as well places like Mexico. A few things to point out. Some are complete frauds, like in Mexico, they also make fake documents, etc. and then you get citizenship this way. And they’re really tightening up in Mexico.

When I was back there in August, I had to renew my daughter’s passport. She turned three and newborns in Mexico get a passport with a three-year validity. And when we’re applying for her passport renewal, they were extremely strict. They completely, they audited us completely. They asked so many questions, essentially as soon as we came in they suspected fraud. They asked all these background questions, where we live, how long we travel, who the names of the grandparents of the child are, when did the grandparents travel to Mexico, etc. etc. and then they were verifying all our answers through the system to try to see whether this was a citizenship that had been fraudulently obtained for the child.

The Mexican authorities are acutely aware that there is a lot of fraud going on in their immigration department, specifically for citizenships and they’re clamping down on it. In some cases, people end up on Interpol lists and then get caught at the next border whenever they try to use it. So Mexico is a particularly dangerous one to be playing with. I mean that’s not even citizenship by exception, that’s just pure fraud.

African passports

Then there are a few African countries. You go through some middleman, you send them money and then you get a passport. The issue with these is you’re not really sure whether you’re going to be able to renew them in five years’ time.

It’s not like the Sierra Leone citizenship by investment program or the Sao Tome citizenship by investment program, which are official. There are government officials that are out there with their faces in front of everyone saying, yes, we’re running this program, we sell citizenships, we sell access to our country. Yes, it’s a genuine program that we use to develop our country. In the other cases, it’s just people that call them citizenship by exception, but it’s just essentially paying a few officials here and there and you never quite know what could happen.

I myself was offered a citizenship by exception in a Central African country a while ago. It was really affordable. A lot of people were going through the process and then eventually the government caught up to it because they were seeing all these people from Mali and Niger and Central African Republic going through this program because that country in Central Africa is richer than the other ones and then they got triggered and they’re like, we need to stop this. They didn’t quite know how to go about it because all the documents are really messy in that country. So they just said, whenever you renew your passport now for the next five years, you have to show proof how you obtained your citizenship.

So people that just came with a naturalization certificate from a judge, that was the the way it was being done, you’d pay a judge essentially, then you have to prove okay, how did you actually get the judge’s decision? And that point people get caught or have to pay more etc. Essentially people paid for a passport, not a citizenship.

Citizenship by exception in Eastern Europe

And then there are countries on the fringes of the European Union that have these programs. You have to be very careful because various security services particularly in Europe are all over it because if you are a country say in the Balkans that is selling citizenship and you’re selling it to not just Westerners but a lot of Russians, that is deemed to be a very high security risk for multiple European Union countries.

So intelligence services are all over these programs, they’re putting pressure on the government and if there were to be a change in government in some of these countries, then potentially you could be facing issues with your renewal down the line because it was never really official. And if you look back into what happened to that money because it was never official and never really recognized by the government, so it would be very easy for a new government after a regime change to look back and say what was that, we never approved this, this wasn’t official and then to use this program as retribution against officials of the former party in place.

So I’m not saying that this is what’s going to happen. There are a few countries that are doing this, but it’s a high risk. So I’m not saying this is going to happen for sure, that’s absolutely not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that these programs are far from cheap and you want to make sure that you go through a very reputable firm if you do go through such a program to minimize risk because in case of audits the money trail would potentially not be very pretty.

So the key lessons are if it’s too good to be true, it probably is. And if it’s not official, if you don’t have government officials that are standing by this program, then you want to make sure that you choose proper service providers that know exactly what they’re doing because there are a lot of things that could go wrong with citizenships by exception and there’s also a lot of fraud. So just be very careful. I’m not saying don’t do these things, I’m just saying tread carefully.

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