All in all last year, 1,930 people applied for residence permits on the basis of marriage to a Finn.
Increasingly, marriages are being arranged for large sums of money. The newspaper interviewed one Moroccan man, who says that the cost of a marriage runs from thousands to tens of thousands of euros.
Jaakko Sonck, of the National Bureau of Investigation, says that punishments for fraudulent residency applications are very mild.
The most frequent customers of false marriages are Russians, Africans, and Thai citizens.