W

ith its status as the country'€™s most popular tourist destination, Bali has also become a haven for nefarious tourists who visit the resort island to look for jobs without proper entry permits, run criminal operations or commit other illegal activities, immigration authorities have warned.

The Ngurah Rai Immigration Office on Thursday reported that during the first nine months of the year it had deported around 190 foreigners from Bali, mainly due to visa violations.

Immigration has also deported several international fugitives wanted by Interpol for crimes they committed in their native countries.

'€œGenerally speaking, the Balinese people are friendly toward tourists. This, however, has been misused by foreigners with bad intentions. I must remind them that not all tourists are good and we have to be alert,'€ Ngurah Rai Immigration chief Yosep HA Renung Widodo said.

As a world-famous tourist destination, Bali has been generating high numbers of foreign tourist arrivals over the past few decades.

This year, as of August, 2.6 million foreign tourists visited Bali. This figure is higher than the 2.4 million tourist arrivals to the resort island recorded during the same period last year.

Among common immigration violations in Bali, according to Yosep, are those related to work permits.

Earlier this month, for example, immigration officials arrested a Malaysian national, identified as Look Kok Kuen, for using a tourist visa to work as a marketing manager for local company PT Bali Mulia Wisata.

Bali, according to Yosep, has also become a haven for international cybercrime syndicates.

In August, law enforcers arrested 48 Chinese and Taiwanese citizens for running a cybercrime operation from Bali. All of them were immediately deported.

'€œWe have to be alert to these cybercrime perpetrators. We suspect that the increasing number of Chinese tourists in Bali is related to the rise of cybercrime activity,'€ Yosep said.

Apart from visa violations, immigration has also managed to arrest foreigners who attempted to fly to other countries from Bali'€™s Ngurah Rai International Airport using counterfeit passports.

For example, on Aug. 2, a Pakistani national, identified as Tauqeer Abbas, was arrested after he tried to pass the immigration counter using a forged British passport. Abbas was on his way to catch a flight to Australia when he was arrested.

During this interrogation, Abbas insisted that he only wanted to go to Australia for a holiday.

On Sept. 30, the Ngurah Rai Immigration Office also arrested four people who tried to go to New Zealand through the airport by using fake passports from the United Arab Emirates.

'€œWe are still investigating the case. They will remain in detention until we find out what their actual nationality is. We think that they are asylum seekers from Iraq or Syria,'€ Yosep said.

Yosep said that the efforts of immigration officials to protect Indonesia from '€œbad tourists'€ had been strengthened by the decision to deny entry to tourists suspected of having breached immigration laws.

'€œThis year, as of September, the Ngurah Rai Immigration office has rejected 493 foreigners from entering Bali,'€ Yosep said, adding that around 15 of them were suspected to be pedophiles.

Last year, immigration also deported 139 foreigners, mainly due to immigration violations.

Separately, Bali Police spokesperson Sr. Comr. Hery Wiyanto said that police would continue to monitor tourists holidaying in Bali. He admitted that not all tourists were doing good things during their stay in Bali.

Bali Police recorded that during this year, as of August, at least 165 foreigners had been arrested for various crimes. Only 47 foreigners were arrested during the same period last year.

'€œAmong the crimes committed by these foreigners are narcotics-related crimes and document counterfeiting,'€ Hery said.