In Romania, a quiet village near the Ukrainian border has emerged at the center of a vast scheme helping thousands of mostly Russians fraudulently acquire Romanian citizenship and, with it, access to the European Union, according to Le Monde. Searches uncovered a vast fraud network exploiting Romania’s civil system to give Russians access to EU residency, travel, and tax benefits.
A ghost town doubles in size — on paper
In Vârfu Câmpului, a commune in northern Romania, official records show the population more than doubled from 3,420 in 2011 to over 7,000 in 2021, Le Monde reported. By 2024, almost 10,000 people were listed on the electoral rolls — but some polling stations saw just 2% voter turnout during local elections that June.
In November 2024, dozens of searches revealed the source of the sudden growth. Around 10,000 people from Moldova, Ukraine, and Russia had received Romanian identity documents using fictitious addresses in the commune — some without the knowledge or consent of property owners. Civil registry officials, with the help of local residents, reportedly issued forged documents for bribes.
The fraud extended beyond Vârfu Câmpului. In 2025, Romanian police raided sites in Botoșani and Suceava counties and in Bucharest. On 18 December, 37 searches were carried out, including one at Bucharest’s Sector 6 city hall. Prosecutors said the raids targeted two separate forgery cases.
According to the General Prosecutor’s Office, a criminal group of seven Ukrainian nationals — all living in Romania — was behind more than 900 fraudulent naturalization applications in 2025 alone, mostly for Russian citizens. The group allegedly worked with local notaries, lawyers, and translators.
Overwhelmed systems, fake documents, stolen identities
“A wave of requests nearly blocked our services,” said Constantin Florea, deputy director of the civil registry office at Sector 6 city hall in Bucharest.
Officials there canceled 68 identity documents and were reviewing 300 more. Several submitted citizenship certificates turned out to be fake and not issued by the National Authority for Citizenship (ANC), the only legal issuer.
Authorities estimate that more than 18,700 people from the former USSR now appear in Romania’s residency database based on fake addresses. Some already received Romanian passports.
A police source and a judicial source told Le Monde that Russian applicants used identities of Ukrainian soldiers killed in combat to bolster their claims.
How Romanian law allowed the fraud to begin
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Since 1991, Romania has granted citizenship to descendants of people from former Romanian territories, allowing about one million Moldovans and thousands of Ukrainians — and later Russians and Belarusians — to obtain passports.
After the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, demand surged as EU access tightened, leading to a sharp rise in fraudulent applications. Authorities say Russian and Belarusian applications spiked in 2023–24, with around 2,000 suspected fraud cases since 2022.
A black market of fake heritage and forged certificates
Criminal groups in Moldova and Ukraine exploited destroyed wartime archives to fabricate fake genealogies. They claimed, for example, that an applicant’s grandmother was born in Cernăuți or Chișinău. Authorities in those countries certified the documents without means to verify them.
Le Monde reports that ANC had in many cases issued real Romanian citizenship certificates based on these fake genealogies. In response, Romania added new rules in 2024, requiring applicants to pass a Romanian language test.
But forgers quickly shifted tactics. Instead of faking supporting documents, they began forging the ANC certificates directly. That bypassed the two-year legal process — and delivered results in just weeks.
Prices for such certificates reportedly reached tens of thousands of euros. Buruian said one client paid €75,000 to an intermediary. He showed Le Monde the certificate: a plain A4 sheet that he called “easily falsifiable”. According to prosecutors, criminals exploited “human, legislative and organizational loopholes” to push the forgeries through.
