The criminals are seeking immunity from the United States COVID-19 by selling counterfeits issued by the government “vaccination registration cards “ which shows that humans were inoculated.
Hundreds of fraudsters sell blank or counterfeit versions of cards on e-commerce sites, including eBay, Etsy and Shopify, while also broadcasting fake ads on Facebook, according to Saoud Khalifah, CEO of Fakespot, which uses artificial intelligence to detect online retail scams. . And with names like blankcovidcard.com, such sellers are hard to tell.
“In January we started to see Shopify stores selling fake vaccination cards and this was really interesting because it introduced a new dynamic in society, where people can fake immunity and file it with a fake card,” he said. said Khalifah for CBS MoneyWatch. “It’s a new concept I’ve never seen before.”
Fakespot has identified hundreds of different vendors that have appeared since the beginning of the year, and the company estimates that they have given over thousands of false records in the last three months. Online retail sites have banned some bad players, who then reappear and often sell fake books under different names, according to Khalifah.
Kindness Fakespot
Records of low-tech vaccines are easy to reproduce. 4-by-3-inch, double-sided paper books bears the logo of the Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in black and white, along with the name of the cardholder and the date of birth. Also note the doctor, the batch number and the date and location of the vaccine given. The information is annotated either in pen or on a printed sticker.
A vendor, whose Shopify store is now defunct, sold a pack of four blank vaccination cards for $ 80.
Prosecutors are calling for action
Shopify, a platform that allows retailers to create e-commerce sites, said it has acted quickly against users of its technology who try to sell fraudulently. vaccine cards. Hawking fake cards violate the company’s policies, the company told CBS MoneyWatch, noting that it has been monitoring its platform for such schemes since February.
The National Association of Attorneys General last week called on eBay, Shopify and Twitter to stop people from selling or advertising fake CDC vaccine cards on their platforms. So far, Shopify has closed three stores it found selling fake or blank vaccination cards or fraudulent vaccine stamps.
“If our search identifies a potentially banned product, our team will quickly examine the store and the product and take appropriate action,” Vivek Narayanadas, Shopify’s legal vice president, wrote in a letter to the National Association of Attorneys General.
“All the stores we identified for violating our policies were acted upon quickly,” Narayanadas said in a statement to CBS MoneyWatch.
Etsy has also confirmed that the sale of fake vaccine books violates the site’s rules and eliminates any posts that publish false records. EBay said it quickly blocks or removes items from its market that make false health claims, “including vaccine ID cards or any other similar items that could be used to falsely represent a person who received the vaccine.” .
A Twitter spokesman said it had stepped up efforts to block misinformation and deleted tweets and accounts that violate its misleading information policies. Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Khalifah of Fakespot suspects that some buyers of fake cards are “anti-vaxxers” who do not intend to be vaccinated, but want any access that a card can allow.
For example, airlines and the travel industry weigh whether proof of travel vaccination is needed. Some countries, including Mexico, require visitors to submit negative COVID-19 tests for entry. Evidence of vaccination could be next, according to experts.
People who are not yet eligible for the vaccine or who cannot book an appointment can also forge an empty card to make it look like they have received a dose of vaccine and should receive it for a second, allowing cut them lines.
“You can buy small brochures with fake stamps, so you can get around the whole system that the government has created,” Khalifah said.
The tools designed to digitize paper records aim to combat this type of fraud by checking and storing people’s records in secure online safes.
“This would make it difficult to counterfeit physical documents, but there will still be hackers who can hijack other people’s identities, so it will not be bulletproof,” Khalifah said.
red flags
VaxYes, a tool that turns paper cards into digital vaccine certificates, puts people through several rounds of security checks to make sure their records are authentic. The company also uses artificial intelligence and trained medical professionals to scan cards for any irregularities that indicate they may be counterfeit.
“We get thousands of books and so far everyone is familiar with them, so we wonder if there are any anomalies compared to other books,” Mohamad Gaber, CEO of VaxYes, told CBS MoneyWatch.
Gaber said less than 2 percent of the books VaxYes reviewed were “questionable” or directly inauthentic. Cards that do not write down the batch number of a vaccine or that carry handwritten numbers, rather than printed stickers, raise red flags.
“A lot of people generated these cards because they’re very easy to recreate. I’ve seen a number of versions of cards that people have downloaded and completed, unauthorized,” he said.
Against the law
The sale of fake vaccination cards violates federal laws that prohibit the unauthorized use of the seal of an official government agency, including one used by the CDC, the FBI said in a statement last month.
The FBI has also warned people against participating in related scams that could be a felony. “If you have not received the vaccine, do not buy fake vaccine cards, do not make your own vaccine cards and do not fill in the unfilled vaccination registration cards with false information,” the Bureau said. “By misrepresenting yourself as being vaccinated when entering schools, mass transportation, jobs, gyms or places of worship, you put yourself and others around you at risk of contracting COVID-19. “
Fraudulent use of an official US government seal is a felony punishable by a maximum sentence of five years in prison. People who falsify vaccination cards to travel, return to work or attend events can also be charged with knowingly putting other people at risk of receiving COVID-19.
“If I have never been vaccinated and have a high risk of transmitting COVID-19 and I am in a public place and it turns out that I am a ‘zero patient’ and I have made other people sick – or someone has died – I could be charged some kind of homicide through guilt or criminal negligence, “said Randy Zelin, a criminal defense attorney at Wilk Auslander.” I would have turned a blind eye to the high probability of being able to kill someone, and I went ahead and did- or anyway “.