eli5: How was the authenticity of a foreign passport ensured, before cryptographic signatures there a thing?

Question

eli5: How was the authenticity of a foreign passport ensured, before cryptographic signatures there a thing?

In: Other

Answer 1

Link about my country: https://www.wsj.com/articles/brazil-worries-it-has-become-a-haven-for-russian-spies-infiltrating-the-west-525021ba

Passports are rarely forged. It is too expensive to have independent high-quality material (paper, ink, plastic) and good prints for appropriate watermarks for producing counterfeit passports that can pass as legitimate. It is easier to bribe passport officials so that they produce a illegal passport document through regular process or to trick passport officials by going through regular passport process but using easier to counterfeit documents.