A vaccination card without a vaccination? A gang of fraudsters makes it possible. The investigators have now succeeded in striking the counterfeiters. But the illegal market is booming – analog and digital.
Munich / Nuremberg – 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.
You find money and crypto currencies of almost 100,000 euros in the action on Friday, there are two arrests: An important blow against counterfeiters. But that should hardly solve the problem. Because Bavaria’s police are registering more and more vaccination cards with fake Corona certificates.
“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. At the beginning of September there were only 110 cases.
Fake-Codes im Internet
In the Munich case, a pharmacy and private apartments had been searched. Since mid-August, the fraudsters are said to have offered fake codes on a German-language cybercrime forum on the Internet, as reported by the responsible investigators at the Bavarian Central Office for Combating Fraud and Corruption in the Health Care System (ZKG). In the end, you had to pay 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.
“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 are putting the lives of others at risk because of the incalculable risk of infection. There are rightly high penalties. “
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.
Nationwide problem
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. In the case of the Munich fraud gang, the pharmacy employee and an accomplice came into custody, in this case 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 gained in value, as they usually make the tests that are otherwise chargeable for many people superfluous. 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. dpa
