In Covid-Era Travel Fraud Fraudsters Provide False Test Results

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

Allegations of Covid-19 test fraud are circulating around the world. A man was arrested outside 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 travelers at Charles de Gaulle Airport near Paris. Police first discovered 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 fake certificates on the suspects’ phones, according to French prosecutors.

In late January, police in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, said they had arrested eight people who were allegedly involved in a scam to sell fabricated negative test results to travelers.

Indonesian authorities arrested 15 people in a separate plan that month, accusing them of offering false results for about $ 70 each. According to police, a former medical office at Soekarno-Hatta International Airport obtained a soft copy of a negative test certificate and used it from October to print about 20 falsified test results a day.

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

Taiwan banned Indonesian migrant workers in December, saying they could not trust the Covid-19 test results from the country. Earlier that month, four-fifths of the Indonesian workers who gave the Taiwanese authorities test results showed they were free of the virus, and then tested positive for Covid-19 after being swept away in Taiwan.

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

The government agency of Indonesia, which handles cases of migrant workers, said it would step up supervision of the testing of migrant workers to prevent false tests.

The potential for fraud is huge amid a patchwork of international travel restrictions adopted during the pandemic.

“Paper test results not only come in different formats and languages, but they 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 that passengers present to them.”

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

One effort to facilitate the test verification process is CommonPass, a project supported by the nonprofit The Commons Project Foundation, under which each country will be asked to share its testing and vaccination requirements for travelers, and the names of the facilities who trust the authorities. Administer Covid-19 tests.

The designated facilities will then enter travelers’ Covid-19 test and vaccination information into CommonPass-enabled data systems so that individuals can share this data with airlines and border authorities. “It’s a way to issue a certificate effectively – a digital certificate, like a test certificate or a vaccination record – but in a way that’s tampering,” said Commons CEO Paul Meyer. project, said.

The CommonPass was tested on several international flights last year and according to the Commons project, the efforts are being coordinated with more than 20 governments.

IATA says it is also developing a mobile app called IATA Travel Pass that allows passengers to share test results with authorities in a way that, according to the association, will make it nearly impossible to travel with fake documents.

But getting all countries to accept the same digital passes is a challenge to create hurdles 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 the full travel ban and mandatory quarantines as long as the pandemic continues,” said Bradley Perkins, chief medical officer. at the Commons Project and a former Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

—Lekai Liu and Sam Schechner contributed to this article.

Write to Jon Emont by [email protected]