Supply and demand: that is how the scam marriage came out. There are always some people in the world who are not satisfy with the situation in their own countries and would like to escape at all costs. And there are accordingly a number of people who realize this and would be willing to risk their own freedoms for the riches that immigration fraud can offer.
It is an insult when marriage is set up to get round immigrations laws. However, blinded by quiet large sum of money—the earning can be as high as £5,000 to arrange a marriage which will give a bride or groom greater rights to stay in the UK—those people are willing to take chances to marry with somebody they have never met before, even they knew that immigration fraud is a crime. After all, love is hard to trace and prove, and no one bother to investigate until the crime raise to a huge amount—3,578 suspect marriages were reported to the British Government by registrars in 2004. It is therefore the new immigration marriage rules have been introduced to stop the marriage fraud.
Though the number of scam marriages went down sharply after the British Government introduced the new immigration marriage rules in 2005, it is still very hard to crackdown such crimes. According to the British senior registrars, before the new legislation launched in February 2005, there could have been at least 10,000 scam marriages a year. Registrars at Brent Council in north London, one of the most diverse areas of Britain, suggested in 2005 that a fifth of all marriages there were bogus, with officials able to spot couples who barely knew each other. Moreover, Scotland on Sunday of Last month reported that scam marriage in Scotland is still taking place every day.
Trial scam marriage is hard, because nobody knows how to scale it in a scientific way. In most of cases, the involving UK-citizen accepts a one-time payment from the foreigner, usually they will have a wedding and live as roommates, or at least to set up a family that make them appear to live together. Such cases are the hardest to uncover, since doing so would require a great deal of manpower and resource. Still, some people who commit this crime believe it as good thing for helping someone out.
Not matter how a scam marriage will benefit a fake couple, it is still a serious crime and will be punished by jail. Those who give up their freedoms to scam marriages seems seldom have happy ending. After all, freedom is never free.
