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Andrew and Tristan Tate are facing a combined 59 criminal charges in the United Kingdom. And if the brothers are truly innocent, as they’ve insisted all along, the aliases on their fake passports tell a pretty different story.
British prosecutors laid out the details in court documents tied to the brothers’ bond hearing in Florida. Turns out the Tates had stockpiled a whole collection of fake passports under different names. One of them – a Mexican passport belonging to Tristan – used the alias “Vladimir Scorpius.” That’s not a name he made up on the spot, either; it’s lifted straight from the 1988 James Bond novel Scorpius, where the character is a weapons dealer running a cult.
The fake documents weren’t limited to one country. Investigators found passports tied to the UK, the US, Estonia, Nigeria, Poland – and even Vanuatu, a small Pacific island nation that doesn’t exactly come up often in international fraud cases.
Tristan didn’t just carry the fake passport around quietly, either.
He posted a video online where he flat-out declared, “I’m Vladimir Scorpius.” He then went a step further and registered a UK company under the name Scorpius Ltd. Meanwhile, his brother Andrew was busy bragging on social media about having “8 lives… 8 licenses and passports,” claiming he’d used them to dodge authorities across multiple countries.
Arrest and Extradition
US Marshals arrested both brothers in Miami on July 19 after a UK extradition warrant came through. They’re now facing charges tied to rape, sex trafficking, and related offenses back in the UK – and they’re currently sitting in federal custody while the extradition case plays out.
The UK charges aren’t the only legal trouble following them, either. Romanian authorities have their own trafficking case against the brothers running in parallel.
New Charges, Old Allegations
British prosecutors didn’t stop at the original case. They filed 38 new charges against the Tates, alleging the offenses took place between 2010 and 2017 – years before their current legal troubles began – in the area north of London where the brothers grew up.
Andrew’s new charges include seven additional counts of rape, sex trafficking, and possessing indecent images of a child. Tristan, for his part, is facing two counts of rape along with three counts tied to arranging or facilitating trafficking for sexual exploitation.
Matt Jury, a lawyer representing several alleged British victims, didn’t hold back after the arrests:
“Andrew and Tristan Tate are accused of some of the most serious offences, including multiple counts of rape and human trafficking. It is time they face justice.”
Under English law, a conviction on even a handful of these charges could mean life imprisonment for either brother.
For now, both men remain at FCI Miami – a low-security federal correctional institution in Miami-Dade County – while they wait to find out whether they’ll actually be extradited to face all of this.
