The increased policing at Paphos International Airport, due to the military conflicts in the wider region during 2026, as well as the coordinated operation of the security services of the Republic, apparently managed to completely strike at the networks of forgers and traffickers of forged documents operating in the occupied territories.
For many months, almost the daily life of Paphos airport included news about foreigners attempting to travel through Paphos airport to Western European countries, presenting fake documents supplied by the occupied territories and presenting them as citizens of the European Union.
In most cases, the fraud was uncovered by the arrival of these people at the airport checkpoints, when they ended up instead of in France or other countries, in the detention centers and then on the plane to their place of origin. However, there were also cases where the trip became a reality from Paphos, only to be interrupted at the destination, resulting in their return back to Cyprus.
Since the beginning of this year, however, the phenomenon of forged documents has almost completely disappeared at Paphos airport. Now, the practice was immediately noticed by the airport security services, with the result that, as everything shows, these people were looking for safer methods and routes for them in order to illegally enter the territory of the large European states, which was their final goal.
However, there has been an upsurge at Paphos Airport in recent months regarding the transport of duty-free tobacco products through Paphos Airport to European destinations, mainly Britain. Tourists fill their luggage with tobacco products from the occupied territories and try to transport them without paying the required duties, with the result that the Police and Customs are working "overtime" to attack this new fraud.
