The revolution of 1952 broke out, and the British realized that the Egyptians sympathized with the new government, and they grew more stringent in fighting counterfeiting. Refaat, worried that he would be discovered, left his job and got a new fake passport from a Swiss journalist, moving from one name to another until he was arrested by a British officer while traveling to Libya in 1953. He was arrested carrying a British passport but the British officer thought he was Israeli, so he was handed over to the Egyptian Intelligence service which started investigating him as a probable Israeli spy.