Up to 1 in 5 civil ceremonies in UK cities could be sham marriages, according to one of Britain's most senior registrars.
The chairman of the Local Registration Services Association Mark Rimmer told Sky News the number of cases reported to the Home Office was "just the tip of the iceberg".
The number of reported cases has tripled in the last three years to 1,800, but Mr Rimmer said many more people could be abusing immigration law with the overall figure nearly 10 times higher.
He believes 15,000 of the 173,000 civil weddings that take place each year in England and Wales could be bogus.
In cities and urban areas of "ethnicity" one in five marriages are suspicious, he added, with bogus ceremonies taking place "multiple times per week" in London.
He said: "We have seen huge increases in potential sham marriages presenting themselves to us, we now have more reports from registrars going to the Home Office, but I think that is the tip of a very large iceberg, and effectively the real scale of the problem is far greater than that that is reported to the Home Office officially."
"Most registration officers are not immigration officers, they came into this business to facilitate marriage. So therefore they don't want to be cynical.
"Unfortunately therefore what happens is the ones that are absolutely blatant get reported and there are some that are borderline that slip through without being reported - and that is the iceberg under the water and that's huge - it is absolutely huge."
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