Interpol

INTERPOL is the International Criminal Police Organization — a body that connects the police forces of its member countries so they can share information and cooperate across borders. It has no officers of its own and no power of arrest. For identity verification its most relevant asset is the database of lost and stolen travel documents, which holds around 138 million records.

What INTERPOL is not

The popular picture is wrong in a specific way worth correcting, because it affects how its outputs should be treated.

INTERPOL does not investigate, arrest or prosecute. It is an information-sharing infrastructure: member countries submit data, and other members can query it. Every enforcement action is taken by a national police force under national law.

That matters most for Notices. A Red Notice is a request to locate and provisionally arrest a person pending extradition — a request, not a warrant. Whether it has any effect depends entirely on the country receiving it. Notices have also been misused by member states against political opponents, which is why treating one as an adjudicated finding of anything is a mistake.

The travel document database, and what its numbers show

The SLTD database is the piece that touches document verification directly. Member countries report passports and other travel documents as lost or stolen, and border and police authorities can check a document against the record.

Two figures are worth sitting with. The database holds roughly 138 million records, and in 2023 it was searched about 3.6 billion times, producing around 232,000 hits.

That is a hit rate of roughly one in fifteen thousand. Read one way it makes the check look marginal. Read correctly it is the profile of a control working as intended: the overwhelming majority of documents presented at borders are fine, and the value is in the small number that are not. It is the same shape as sanctions screening — a great deal of checking to find a few, and the few are the point.

The database has also produced false positives, including reported cases of valid passports being incorrectly flagged, which is the predictable cost of any list-based check operating at that volume and the reason a hit should trigger a process rather than a conclusion.

Why this matters for identity verification

A lost or stolen passport is a genuine document. It will pass a security features check, its chip will authenticate correctly, its machine-readable zone will parse and its check digits will validate — because none of that has changed. Every technical check a verification system can perform on the document itself returns a pass.

What has changed is who holds it, and that is not a property of the document. It is recorded in a database maintained by the country that issued it.

This makes SLTD a clean illustration of a limit that recurs throughout this glossary: document authentication establishes that a document is real, and nothing more. Two things address the gap. A status check against authoritative records, where an organization has lawful access — which for SLTD generally means police and border authorities rather than commercial firms. And a biometric comparison binding the document to the person presenting it, which is available to anyone and is what identity document verification does at the point of capture. Identity verification that authenticates a document without binding it to a person has verified a stolen passport perfectly.

What INTERPOL can’t do

It cannot arrest anyone. It coordinates; national forces act.

A Red Notice is not a warrant or a conviction. It is a request whose effect depends on the receiving country, and it has been misused.

Its databases are not open to commercial verification providers. SLTD access runs through National Central Bureaus to police and border authorities.

Coverage depends on member reporting. A document is only in SLTD if the issuing country reported it, and reporting practice varies.

Frequently asked questions

What is INTERPOL?

The International Criminal Police Organization, which connects the police forces of around 195 member countries so they can share information and cooperate across borders. It has no officers and no power of arrest — all enforcement is carried out by national police under national law.

What is the SLTD database?

INTERPOL’s Stolen and Lost Travel Documents database, holding roughly 138 million records of passports and other travel documents reported lost or stolen by member countries. It is queried by border and police authorities through their National Central Bureaus.

Is a Red Notice an arrest warrant?

No. It is a request to locate and provisionally arrest a person pending extradition, and its effect depends entirely on the country receiving it. Notices have been misused by some member states against political opponents, so one should not be read as a finding of guilt.

Can a verification system check a passport against INTERPOL’s database?

Generally not directly. SLTD access runs through National Central Bureaus to police and border authorities rather than to commercial providers. What a commercial system can do is authenticate the document and bind it biometrically to the person presenting it — which is what a stolen document defeats, since the document itself is genuine.

Related reading

• Security features check — why a stolen document passes every check made on the document
• Biometric passport — the document class SLTD mostly records
• The Egmont Group — the equivalent network for financial intelligence units
• Sanctions list — the same shape of problem — list checks, false positives, and what they prove