In the Covid-Era travel scam, fraudsters provide false test results

“As long as travel restrictions remain in place due to the Covid-19 situation, it is very likely that the production and sales of false test certificates will predominate,” Europol, the European Union’s law enforcement agency, said this month.

Allegations of Covid-19 test fraud have surfaced around the world. A man was arrested outside London’s Luton Airport in late January in connection with the sale of fake Covid-19 test certificates.

In November, French authorities arrested seven people for selling fake certificates to passengers at Charles de Gaulle Airport near Paris. Police first encountered the fraud after discovering a passenger with a fake certificate on a flight to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. After the arrests, police found more than 200 false certificates on the suspects’ phones, which allowed people to fly internationally, according to French prosecutors.

In late January, police in Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta, said they had arrested eight people allegedly involved in a scam to sell the results of negative tests to passengers.

That month, Indonesian authorities arrested 15 people in a separate system, accusing them of providing false results for about $ 70 each. Police say a former worker at the Soekarno-Hatta International Airport health office seized an electronic copy of a negative test certificate and, since October, has used it to print about 20 falsified results of tests per day.

In the Philippines, a government research institute affiliated with the health department warned last month that people posing as its employees were selling false Covid-19 test results.

Taiwan banned Indonesian migrant workers in December, saying it could not trust the results of Covid-19 tests in the country. Earlier that month, four-fifths of Indonesian workers who provided Taiwanese authorities with test results that showed they were virus-free passed a positive test for Covid-19 after being swabbed in Taiwan.

“These reports are becoming increasingly inaccurate,” Taiwan’s health minister Chen Shih-chung said in December. “We have no idea what kind of problems they have.”

The Indonesian government agency, which deals with migrant workers’ problems, said it would tighten test surveillance for migrant workers to prevent false tests.

The potential for fraud is abundant amid a mix of international travel restrictions that were adopted during the pandemic.

“Paper test results come not only in a variety of formats and languages, but can also be easily manipulated,” said Albert Tjoeng, a spokesman for the International Air Transport Association, which represents about 290 airlines worldwide. He said check-in agents should “try to determine the authenticity of several non-standard test documents presented to passengers”.

The problem does not have an easy solution. Some governments have warned of the action. Singapore, for example, says travelers who produce fake test certificates will have restrictions on their ability to live in the city-state in the future, while the Chinese government has warned of “legal liability”.

An effort to make the testing process easier is CommonPass, a project supported by the nonprofit The Commons Project Foundation, in which each country will be asked to share its testing and vaccination requirements for travelers and the names of the facilities in which the authorities trust to administer Covid-19 tests.

The designated facilities will then enter the Covid-19 test and vaccination information of the passengers into the data systems that can be accessed by the CommonPass, allowing individuals to share this data with airlines and border authorities. “It’s a way to effectively issue a certificate – a digital certificate, such as a test certificate or a vaccination file – but in a way that’s evidence of forgery,” said Paul Meyer, director executive in the Commons Project.

CommonPass was tested on several international flights last year, and the Commons project says it is coordinating its efforts with more than 20 governments.

IATA says it is also developing a mobile application called the IATA Travel Pass, which will allow passengers to share test results with authorities in a way that, according to the association, will make it almost impossible to travel with false documents.

But getting all countries to accept the same digital subscriptions is a challenge, creating obstacles in an already difficult travel regime.

“Without the ability to trust Covid-19 tests – and ultimately vaccine records – across international borders, many countries will feel compelled to maintain full travel bans and mandatory quarantines as long as the pandemic persists,” he said. Bradley Perkins, chief physician at the Commons Project and a former chief strategy and innovation officer at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

—Lekai Liu and Sam Schechner contributed to this article.

Write to Jon Emont at [email protected]