 Due to the difficulty to obtain a new passport in Venezuela, the United States, Canada, Spain and several Latin American countries accept the use expired Venezuelan passports up to five years.On 8 February 2017, a joint CNN and CNN en Español investigation called "Passports in the Shadows" () - based on the information provided by a whistleblower and subsequent investigations, reported that employees of the Venezuelan embassy in Baghdad, Iraq has been selling passports and visas to persons from Middle Eastern countries (specifically Syria, Palestine, Iran, Iraq and Pakistan) with dubious backgrounds for profits, including to members of the Lebanese group Hezbollah.The Venezuelan immigration department, SAIME, confirmed the sold passports' genuineness as each passport came with an assigned national identification number, although the names of these individuals were altered when checking against the national database.