Polícia Judiciária Records 177 New Marriage-of-Convenience Investigations in 2025 — Manifestação de Interesse Revocation Lifts the File 58% Above the 2024 Count

The Polícia Judiciária opened 177 new investigations into casamentos de conveniência across 2025 — the highest annual reading the unit's investigative file has ever booked, according to figures the PJ released this week and reported by Observador and ECO on Saturday 23 May 2026. The 2025 total sits 65 cases above the 2024 reading of 112, a 58% year-on-year jump and the steepest climb the marriage-of-convenience file has registered since the PJ began tracking it as a discrete crime category.

The Numbers and the Cause

The PJ ties the record file directly to a single policy event: the revocation in June 2024 of the manifestação de interesse mechanism, which had previously let foreigners who entered Portugal on a tourist visa request residency authorisation from inside the country. Once that pathway closed, the unit says, foreign citizens already in irregular status pivoted toward the next legal vehicle that would produce a residency title — marriage with a Portuguese citizen. The 65-case jump in 2025 sits inside a broader enforcement file the Relatório Anual de Segurança Interna (RASI) 2025, published on 31 March 2026, mapped at the macro level: crimes related to illegal immigration climbed 251.3% year-on-year, with marriages of convenience and adjacent offences carrying the bulk of the growth.

How the Scheme Runs

The PJ's most detailed view of the mechanics comes from Operação Aliança Digital, the July 2025 mega-operation in Greater Lisbon that detained 55 suspects, executed 57 search-and-seizure warrants with 300 inspectors, and identified at least 60 marriages the network had brokered. Foreign nationals were paying around €33,000 per arrangement — an all-in price covering the bride, preliminary meetings, document preparation and registry filings. The dismantled network booked roughly €2 million in gross proceeds across the file. Above the brides sat recruiters; above the recruiters, organisers who coordinated cross-border client flows and ran the brand on social platforms. Investigators flagged the Greater Lisbon area as the operational heart of the structure, though the client base reached into irregular-migrant communities across the country.

The Pattern That Follows the Marriage

The PJ's case files describe a recurring downstream sequence. The foreign spouse obtains a residency title on the strength of the marriage, qualifies for Portuguese nationality after the three-year waiting window that applies to spouses of Portuguese citizens under the Lei da Nacionalidade, and — once naturalised — divorces the spouse and opens a family-reunification (reagrupamento familiar) process to bring relatives still living in the country of origin into Portugal on the strength of the now-Portuguese citizenship. The file is not a single transaction; it is a multi-year pipeline that consumes a registry slot, a consular reunification application and, in the PJ's reading, an entire entry stream the manifestação de interesse route used to clear in the open.

What This Means for Expats

The investigation file is not a residency file. PJ marriage-of-convenience investigations target organised networks and the suspected fraudulent marriages they broker — not legitimate mixed-nationality couples. Genuine relationships, including those that lead to a residency title or a nationality application, are not the cohort the unit is reading.
Three-year window under tighter scrutiny. The nationality route for spouses of Portuguese citizens still runs three years from the marriage date, but the Lei da Nacionalidade reform that landed in May 2026 layered additional documentation and family-presence checks on the file. The downstream pattern the PJ describes — naturalise, divorce, reagrupamento familiar — is exactly what the new checks are designed to catch.
Family reunification still applies. Reagrupamento familiar remains an open right for foreign residents and naturalised Portuguese alike; the enforcement focus is on cases where the underlying marriage is fictitious, not on legitimate sponsorships.
Reporting channel. Tips about brokered marriages or recruitment networks can be filed with the PJ through pj.pt or via the MAI complaints portal. The PJ's investigative file does not act on civil-registry data alone; it requires a referral or a parallel investigation flag.