implied but not stated definitively the next stop was the USA. implying but not stating they had tickets. anyone familiar with getting foreign nationals into the USA knows that a ticket purchase auto starts a scan of all available data bases for anomalies. ya gotta guess a sold or stolen altered passport lit up like a Christmas tree as it does every day. they rarely even make it on board the flight. a good story would be how rare altered passports work with USA visas but still work with most countries not attached to anything but Interpol and their internal data.

Five guys using stolen passports to take six separate flights to get to the US, but dallying several days in some of the countries en route, would not appear to be economic migrants. This is a lot of money to spend on the trip, and even if economic migrants had this kind of money to spend, I doubt they’d dawdle for six days in Costa Rica. They’d move on quickly. Also, while some single male economic migrants might head out initially without their families, and could perhaps make the initial journey with buddies, I think most would probably go with their families.

Five guys traveling together on a trip like this looks plenty suspicious. Of course, there are probably 500 more like them, which raises the question of how they managed to make it through four countries with their bogus Greek passports coupled with their inability to speak Greek not raising any red flags. You’d like to think that immigration officials are more on top of things than this.