, it's not that hard these days to
get a new passport under a new name. Unless you're a fugitive, no one
would ever have any reason to question its legitimacy.

Actually it is getting much harder. Pressure is on for nations to use
barcoding and other electronic means of imprinting on passports for
recording, tabulating, and verifying entry and exit records. The phony
document that fools an inspectors eyes won't fool the computers that
examine it. Many countries are instituting policies of requiring visa's
for people coming from nations that will not have have such fraud
proofed passports. And then there's the coming biometric data
requirements...