Two Moldovan lawyers met, became friends, got married -- and discovered they were both using the same fictitious address on their Romanian identity cards.
The story of Alina and Vadim Ignatiuc illustrates how a large portion of Moldova's 3-million population have acquired papers in neighboring Romania, a member of the European Union.
Now, Romania has decided to cancel these papers for 160,000 people, including 100,000 Moldovans.
Neighbors With Benefits
Romania and Moldova are tied by deep historical, cultural, and linguistic links.
Moldova was part of Romania prior to World War II, incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1945, and then became independent in 1991.
Since Romania became an EU member in 2007, there has been a surge of Moldovans taking advantage of Romanian laws giving them an easy path to citizenship.
Some 900,000 Moldovans have, quite legally, acquired Romanian passports. But having a Romanian ID card brings additional benefits such as access to Romanian banking services, a driving license, or receiving child-rearing allowances.
But for an ID card, you need an address in Romania -- and these were often, quite legally, provided by intermediaries.
22,000 People In A Shared Home
Some of the addresses used were uninhabited wrecks. Others were actual homes but could never have accommodated all of the people claiming to live there.
Dozens of addresses had more than 5,000 people registered, said Aurel-Catalin Giulescu, head of Romania's General Directorate of Population Registration (GDPR). One building, dubbed a "fictitious homes factory," registered more than 10,000 Moldovans.
There was even a case where 22,000 people were registered at the same address. Romanian law did not put any limits.
"There was the owner's agreement, and the owner gave his consent in front of the civil servant for each person taken into the space," Spiridon Mocanu, a Moldovan lawyer who has provided intermediary services, told RFE/RL.
Alina Ignatiuc used a different intermediary but was, like many others, not really living at the residential address being used for her ID papers.
"It was known that there were several of us at the same address and that it was not illegal," she told RFE/RL.
Alina and her husband live in Paris. It was there that they got a nasty surprise in March 2025 while visiting the Romanian Consulate to request Romanian ID documents for their child -- only to learn that their own Romanian papers had been canceled.
They had fallen victim to a change in Romanian law, introduced in 2023, putting a limit of 10 unrelated people who can be registered at a single address. The legislative amendment came amid fears that, following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine the previous year, Romania would be vulnerable to infiltration by spies and saboteurs.
But Romanian authorities only began enforcing the new rules in earnest last year following a scandal in which a gang was alleged to be registering thousands of people not only from Moldova, but also Russia. The court case is ongoing.
How Many Russians?
As local media homed in on the story, the authorities in Bucharest refused to disclose how many Russian citizens had obtained Romanian citizenship over the past decade. Responding to a request from RFE/RL, the National Citizenship Authority would only say that 100,000 people "from the former Soviet space" -- excluding Moldova -- had gained Romanian passports between 2010 and 2025.
A problem associated with the rules change is that people have found themselves in bureaucratic delays. Maria Chitoroaga, 38, works in sales and purchased a home in Bucharest after getting citizenship in 2020. In December last year, she sought a new ID card based on her new address.
"I have my own home, bought a year ago, and I said I would get my ID card with a new address," she told RFE/RL. She said the authorities were still checking where she lives. "How hard can it be to verify a person in a digitalized country?"
The authorities say nobody has had their Romanian citizenship or passport canceled as a result of losing their identity card. Driving licenses are also not affected.
Some 20 percent of people who had their cards canceled between 2023 and 2025 have subsequently been able to renew them, according to the GDPR.
