we lost our passport in KL

from this experience i would very much like to say we’re now experts in handling this 👍🏻 long story short, we were pickpocketed 👎🏻👎🏻👎🏻👎🏻👎🏻

we found out that we lost our passports at around 6.30pm 26th MARCH, we started to trace back where we walked, every shop we went to for about 1.5 hours and no one even saw anything so we went to Pavillion Mall’s concierge to try our luck one LAST TIME 🍀 but nope, so they asked us to fill out a form with our contact details and they’ll call us if they find anything. They were really helpful and helped us get to the mini police station in the mall to do a statement and they did a small report for us to bring to the local police station so we don’t have to repeat our story again (since there might be language barrier at the local police station)!

we quickly reported our lost of passport to ICA (if you guys are not panicking like us, you guys can wait 24 hours, because our passports were found 4 hours later so all the hassle we went through was technically …… we brought it upon ourselves for reporting so early lah, but if i don’t report lost i also can’t apply for DOI so)🥲 we also applied for Document of Identity (DOI) on ICA website, it costs $15, and this DOI will act as your passport to allow you to enter Singapore 🇸🇬 after DOI is applied, ICA will send you an email saying your DOI is approved 👏🏻

we called Singapore’s MFA (phone number is attached in the email) as we needed them to expedite our application as we’re bound to fly back to SG on 27th MARCH (which is the next day).

we brought the mini report that was written for us to the local police station ( we spent 3 hours here ) to file a legitimate police report that was apparently needed to get into the embassy. we reached the police station at around 8.30pm, A LOT OF WAITING, let them copy our report to another format, chit chat with the officers there. We got a call from Pavillion saying they found our pouch in the MALE’S TOILET, money all gone, we’re only left with our passports and a YouTrip card. anyway, we were done at around 11.30pm, at this point, TIRED & HUNGRY.

we made arrangements with MFA which allowed us to collect our DOI the very next morning (we were really lucky to have our DOIs approved and ready in less than 12 hours)!!

after the collection of DOI, we still had to go to the Malaysia’s Immigration Office to apply for a special pass (100RM) which would allow us to LEAVE Malaysia, and that took another 2 hours+ of waiting.

Luck was on our side because we managed to catch our 445pm flight without having to push it back or stay another night 😆 thank the lords for SG’s MFA being so prompt if not we would’ve been stranded.

GOOD TO KNOW 🚨:

1. If your lost passport comes back to you (like in our case), you CANNOT reverse the cancellation of your passport. Which means once you report it as LOST, it is invalid and you cant use it anymore, even if you find it, you still have to apply for DOI and do all the necessary procedures to EXIT the country and ENTER Singapore.

2. Off duty officers at the embassy might not know exactly how things work, so better to be safe than sorry!! One guy told us he could reverse our cancellation process so we didn’t head down to the embassy first thing in the morning so we wasted a lot of time there.

3. Embassy is APPOINTMENT BASED ONLY. If it is urgent, call MFA / Embassy to arrange!

4. Once you get all your documents, find somewhere to photocopy all your documents so you don’t waste time to find a photocopying machine when the officers suddenly tell you that you need to photocopy your things (wasted some time there as well)

5. Not really a tip, but pray that you meet amazing people that will help you out. Our grab uncle that sent us from our AirBnb to Pavillion mall offered to send us to our embassy and the immgration office then to the airport so we don’t waste time finding grab 😭 The sergeant from the local police station also contacted me to update him about our progress. And I’m really happy that through this incident we managed to make 2 new amazing friends that we can go to for help when we’re in a foreign country!

6. Once you come back to SG, you have to go to ICA to surrender your LOST passport within 14 days (in the case you found your passport)

so that’s our story of losing our passports, i hope no one will ever need this because PLEASE TAKE CARE OF YOUR PASSPORTS 🫶🏻

#kualalumpur #pickpocket #passport #lostpassport #travel #singapore