NewsPharmacy employee arrested: Hundreds of digital vaccination cards forged

Pharmacy employee arrested: Hundreds of digital vaccination cards forged

A vaccination certificate without a corona vaccination – fraudsters make it possible. The investigators have now succeeded in striking the counterfeiters.

Munich / Nuremberg – The illegal market for analog and digital counterfeiting of a corona vaccination is flourishing. The investigators speak of a procedure of “above average importance”: In Munich police officers arrest a gang of fraudsters who are said to have produced hundreds of fake QR codes for the digital Corona vaccination card and sold them on the Internet.

The officials found money and cryptocurrencies totaling almost 100,000 euros during the action on Friday (October 22nd, 2021), and there were two arrests. It is a major blow to the counterfeiters. But that should hardly solve the problem. Because Bavaria’s police are registering more and more vaccination cards with fake Corona certificates.

Fake corona vaccinations: If you don’t want to be vaccinated, you have to stand by it

“We assume that more and more forged vaccination cards are in circulation,” said Bavaria’s Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann (CSU) of the German Press Agency in Munich. Regardless of the blow against the gang of counterfeiters on Friday, the Bavarian police registered 440 cases related to the forgery of vaccination passports, vaccination certificates or vaccine labels. In comparison, there were 110 cases at the beginning of September.

In the Munich case, a pharmacy and private apartments had been searched. Since mid-August, the fraudsters are said to have offered fake QR codes on a German-language cybercrime forum on the Internet, as reported by the responsible investigators at the Bavarian Central Agency for Combating Fraud and Corruption in the Health Care System (ZKG). In the end, you had to spend 350 euros to get a digital vaccination card – without having been vaccinated against the coronavirus. In October alone, the counterfeiters are said to have issued more than 500 vaccination certificates.

Vaccination against Corona: Counterfeiting puts the lives of others at risk

“It is up to you whether you want to be vaccinated against corona. But if you decide against a vaccination, you have to stand by it, ”emphasized Herrmann. To pretend to be vaccinated in order to go to the restaurant or the cinema without tests, for example, is not just a huge cheek: “These people put the lives of others at risk because of the incalculable risk of infection. There are rightly high penalties. “

In the case of the Munich fraud gang, the pharmacy employee and an accomplice came into custody – it is about “incorrect certificate of a Covid-19 vaccination” and falsification of technical records. Fake vaccination cards are a nationwide problem. Since unvaccinated people have had it much more difficult in everyday life, for example when visiting restaurants or theaters, the corona certificates have increased in value. In Austria, if the corona numbers continue to rise, there could even be a lockdown for unvaccinated people.

Corona vaccination: Counterfeiting can mean imprisonment

The Prime Minister’s Conference called on the federal government on Friday to examine at short notice how the forgery of vaccination, recovery and test certificates can be punished consistently and appropriately. Forged vaccination cards can constitute criminal offenses such as forgery of documents. Anyone who puts them on the market or uses them is liable to prosecution, as a result of which even imprisonment is possible.

Hundreds of people are likely to have obtained false digital vaccination cards from the fraudsters arrested in Munich on Friday. According to the ZKG, which is located at the Nuremberg Public Prosecutor’s Office, it is not possible to determine their names. It is unclear whether their forged vaccination cards can be deleted or made invalid. (dpa / na)

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