Do staple holes in front cover of the passport mean it's damaged?
I applied for a Norwegian visa in my home country through a third-party visa application center that handles all the visa applications for the Norwegian Embassy. I got the visa, but now my passport has two sets of staple holes in it.
The person who handled my application at the visa application center stapled together the "front" cover of my old and new passports when sending the application packet to the embassy.
Do these holes now mean that I will have to get a new passport? Would a passport with 4 staple holes be acceptable in immigration at airports?
Best Answer
This happened to me as well and also via a third-party visa processing center (VFS in my case).
There was a staple punched on the first page, which has my photo. The holes were in the machine readable zone (MRZ), which made me even more upset that my passport wouldn't be accepted.
Turns out, it was all for nothing. No issues whatsoever at any airport or scanning machines. It turns out, the holes are small enough (and the readers are not that sensitive) to make a difference when reading the passport digitally.
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Can I staple things to my passport?
Absolutely correct: documents that are stapled on the pages of the passport, and not glued, can be removed after they have served their usefulness.Can you travel if the front of your passport is faded?
In fact the Home Office warns: "You must replace your passport if it has more than reasonable wear and tear because you may not be allowed to travel with it." That's because a damaged passport may not be accepted as a valid form of identity for you to use when travelling.How forged passports are caught in UAE
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