 By Jennifer Froetschel, DS Public Affairs 
 
 When you stepped inside a building in Accra, Ghana, you were greeted by an American flag and a photo of President Obama. The “consular officers” working there were not Americans, but they spoke English and Dutch and issued official-looking visas and identification papers. Because $6000 is a colossal amount that very few ordinary travellers can afford. There was a famous case of a medical professional that was invited to present a paper at a conference in Spain but was denied visa on the flimsy excuse that he didn’t satisfy the conditions for a visa, which in most cases means that the applicant is not likely to return to Ghana. They also found that a Ghanaian immigration lawyer working with some Turkish and other Ghanaian citizens was involved with the active connivance of Ghana law enforcement officers, who were apparently bribed to look the other way. “The criminals running the operation were able to pay off corrupt officials to look the other way, as well as obtain legitimate blank documents to be doctored.” 
 
 Officials said they shut down the fraudulent operation during the summer after an informant tipped off the assistant investigator for the Regional Security Office. The investigation in Ghana stemmed from a larger State Department initiative, Operation Spartan Vanguard, which was created by the RSO to “address trafficking and fraud plaguing the U.S. Embassy and the region,” according to the statement. This past summer the assistant regional security officer investigator (ARSO-I) at the real U.S. Embassy in Accra, in cooperation with the Ghana Police Force, Ghana Detectives Bureau, and other international partners, shut down this “fake embassy.” 
 
 
 
 Exterior of the legitimate U.S. Embassy in Accra, Ghana (U.S. Department of State photo) 
 
 This investigation is a small part of the broader “Operation Spartan Vanguard" initiative. It is not clear when the criminals were busted but the information was posted on the Department of State’s website on November 2, 2016, the news however, went viral only after ghanabusinessnews.com broke it Friday evening December 2. The information was not contained in a news release from the State Department or its Bureau of Diplomatic Security, but in a “behind the scenes” article written by diplomatic security staff. The “fake embassy” did not accept walk-in visa appointments; instead, they drove to the most remote parts of West Africa to find customers, advertising their services through flyers and billboards to cultivate customers from Ghana, Cote d'Ivoire, and Togo. They would shuttle customers to Accra, rent them rooms in a nearby hotel and then shuttle them to the fake embassy, which only operated on Monday, Tuesday and Friday, from 7:30 a.m. to noon. The Turkish citizens posing as “consulate officers,” officials said, issued U.S. work visas, counterfeit visas and false Ghanaian identification papers, such as bank and education records and birth certificates. (Courtesy of the U.S. State Department) 
 
 The RSO investigator, with officers from the Ghana Police Force, verified the initial informant tip and then formed an international task force that included the Ghana Detective Bureau, Ghana SWAT and Canadian Embassy officials. They exposed the shabby pink building as the crime ring’s central hub and discovered two other locations — a dress shop and an apartment building — that were satellite operators. A raid at the dress shop derailed the investigation when the “corrupt Ghanaian attorney” lied to local police, officials said, telling law enforcement they could not enter the shop because it was involved in a different court case. The "additional court case" was determined to be fallacious, but it bought enough time for corrupt officials to arrange for bail for members of the organized crime group so that they could move the document production facility outside of Accra. The group then moved the document-production facility — including a purported industrial sewing machine that bound the fake passports — outside Accra and exported the fraudulent documents from the dress shop to Europe and other parts of Africa. Several suspects remain at large, but Ghanaian police have warrants for their arrest and plan to pursue them. While US Embassy officials won’t comment because they say investigation of the matter is ongoing, ghanabusinessnews.com can say on authority that some staff of the consular section would be fired. Evidence collected during the raids included a laptop computer, smartphones, counterfeit-identity documents, 150 passports from 10 countries, and legitimate and counterfeit visas from the United States, the Schengen area of Europe, India and South Africa. The regional security officer in Ghana reports that as a result of this and other raids in “Operation Spartan Vanguard,” the export of fraudulent documents have decreased by 70 percent in West Africa, criminal leaders no longer have the political cover they once had, and multiple other investigative avenues have opened to DS and other law enforcement partners, and this is only the beginning. While anyone familiar with visa issuance processes would disbelieve the effectiveness of these connection men to whom prospective travellers pay huge sums of money for visas, these incidents of the fake US Embassy and the example of the European country’s embassy in Ghana emphatically confirm that insiders work with these connection men to issue visas.
– All it takes to convince people you're a US Embassy is an American flag, a picture of President Obama, and a whole lot of visas—at least in Ghana, where a ramshackle building in Accra housed a phony embassy really run by organized crime members from Ghana and Turkey, the Guardian reports. What wasn't fake: the US visas they got their hands on and doled out for the past decade. "The criminals running the operation were able to pay off corrupt officials to look the other way, as well as obtain legitimate blank documents to be doctored," the US State Department said in a Nov. 2 statement (per the Washington Post, the news is only being widely reported now). A visa could be had for $6,000 from "consular officers" who were really Turkish citizens speaking English and Dutch; customers could also get other documents, including phony birth certificates and bank statements. The "embassy," only open three days a week, advertised itself on billboards and in fliers in Ghana and other West African countries. The process of obtaining a visa legally in Ghana is a "dreadful experience," per the Ghana Business News, which is how these con operations flourish. This initiative was discovered after an informant tipped off an investigator involved in a larger trafficking and fraud probe in the area; the fraudulent business was shuttered over the summer. Officials aren't saying how workers acquired the real US visas, or how many people were actually able to enter the US using them or other fake paperwork. "Several suspects" were busted during the raid, per the State Department, with "several" still on the loose. Also unearthed during the investigation: a fake Dutch operation. (Meanwhile, Afghan interpreters who helped US troops were denied visas.)