Want to buy North Korean passports online? Check this out.

Okay, so, I wanted to see if I could get my hands on a North Korean passport, you know, just out of curiosity. It’s like one of the lowest-ranking passports in the world, only gets you into like 39 places without a visa, places like Dominica and Madagascar.

Started with some simple online searches

First, I just typed some stuff into a search engine, like “Buy North Korean passports online”. No real results, most are news articles about North Korea.

Tried to translate to Korean

Then, I thought, maybe I need to search in Korean. I used this free online translator, it was super easy. I just typed in what I wanted to search for and it spit out the Korean translation. Then I copied and pasted that into a search engine.

• Found a few sketchy-looking sites.
• Didn’t really understand what they were saying, obviously.

Used a website translator

So, next, I found this other tool, Weglot. Apparently, it can translate entire websites using machine learning, which is pretty cool. I tried to use it on one of the Korean sites I found. It translated some of the text, but it wasn’t perfect.

• Still couldn’t really tell if these sites were legit or not.
• Lots of mentions of “global war” and “soldiers” and stuff, which was weird.

Tried an image-to-text tool

Some of the sites had images with text on them. I found this other service called Img2txt that’s supposed to convert images to text. I uploaded a few images from the sites and it did extract some text, but it was still mostly gibberish.

• Saw the words “Banggood” and “magazzino UE” a lot. No idea what that means.
• One of the images had something about “South Korea passport ranking” and “193 countries”.

Gave up

Honestly, after a few hours of this, I just gave up. It was way too complicated and I didn’t want to end up doing something illegal. Plus, those websites were giving me the creeps. Maybe it’s best to just leave North Korean passports alone. It was just not easy and I quit.

It’s kinda crazy to think about how different it is for people with South Korean passports. They can go to 193 countries without a visa. That’s a huge difference. Anyway, that was my little adventure. Not very successful, but I learned a few things, I guess.