Peter wrote:
My company’s bank account got ripped off £1500 by somebody with a good copy of my driving license, and when he came back for another £6000 (but walked out when they started asking questions) nobody will look at the CCTV because nobody is interested. The police certainly aren’t.
At the risk of sustaining this off-topic strand… the amount involved is below the fraud threshold at which the police will actively investigate. The threshold exists to avoid overwhelming the police, such is the scale of this type of fraud in the UK. It would have been possible to get the police to investigate if your bank had been willing to pay them to do so (yes, really!). Unless someone is caught in the act, they are very unlikely to be caught at all. The banks merely treat it as a cost of doing business.
Peter wrote:
CCTV is a deterrent.
Actually it’s not. I read a very interesting study made for the British government which showed that CCTV only worked as a deterrent against breaking into cars in parking lots. Effects on other kinds of crime was zero (or at least not statistically significant).
While i love England (i even fly a G-reg!) there certainly IS some arrogance involved. Let’s see how they decide about the EU. …
When i fly to my company in the Czech Republic i don’t even have to call on the radio.
Beeing in Japan at the moment i can tell you that immigration at Tokyo airport is (a lot) quicker than at London Heathrow …
Flyer59 wrote:
Beeing in Japan at the moment i can tell you that immigration at Tokyo airport is (a lot) quicker than at London Heathrow …
I had been flying into Heathrow a lot last year, and the maximum waiting time in front of the e-Passport gates was one minute. Did you use those?
Before WW1 there were no passport controls in Europe, Russia included, except the UK perhaps? Then things happened with some wars and other stuff. The whole of Scandinavia abolished passport controls in 1952. Then Schengen agreement in 2000 or something.
The whole idea of passports is just an unnecessary nuisance, at least between civilized and free countries.
I fully agree with you @LeSving (which is kind of rare 
). Every time I’m in the queue in the UK I feel like I’m somewhere at the other end of the world where we do not have close relationships with, as opposed to a member of the European family. All this narrow minded, uninformed anti-Europe propaganda we get to read does hurt sometimes.
BTW: Some real data on the “we are so special, everybody wants to live here” debate. The UK had a net immigration of 318,000 people in 2014. Germany at the same time had 677,000 net immigrants. That’s more than double. For 2015 I just read the estimates that expect up to 900,000 due to Syria and Eritrea. If you put it in relation to the size of the population I am sure there are countries that take more than Germany, Denmark or Sweden probably. However, it does show that the UK is among the least affected and yet we hear more unreflected propaganda from there than from Marine Le Pen.
Rwy20 wrote:
had been flying into Heathrow a lot last year, and the maximum waiting time in front of the e-Passport gates was one minute. Did you use those
I’ve found these slower (where they are available at all – they aren’t at all airports that serve traffic from other EU countries) than the humans. Typically the e-passport gates take about three times longer than the humans to verify your passport. This is not the end of the world iff they use the e-passport gates to allow more people through at a time, but at this exact moment in time, given equal queue sizes, I’ll queue up at the staffed gates.
achimha wrote:
In no place in the world I had to wait longer in the immigration queue than in the UK.
Although I mainly agree with you on this topic, I must admit that I’ve never waited entering UK more than few minutes. However, entering US and Israel lasted for hours and hours.
Peter wrote:
My company’s bank account got ripped off £1500 by somebody with a good copy of my driving license
This is definitely not a police stuff – it’s bank’s procedure problem – what policy on earth can allow that somebody with driving license can withdraw money from the company account?
Emir wrote:
This is definitely not a police stuff – it’s bank’s procedure problem – what policy on earth can allow that somebody with driving license can withdraw money from the company account?
Depends. If the individual has the right to withdraw money from the company account and a driver’s license is a valid ID (like it is in Sweden), then I’d say it is certainly a police matter.
Yes… in essence the way it works is that if you turn up at the bank in person and can satisfy them you have a valid ID, you can ask them to do anything including the emptying of somebody’s bank account and transferring the money to Switzerland.
Whereas if you tried to do the same thing remotely it would not be possible, due to the various login credentials required. You would have to phish them, etc.
Any personal ID, short of a passport (which doesn’t confirm your address anyway) is trivial to photoshop.
