SAN FRANCISCO – Small rectangular papers started for sale on Etsy, eBay, Facebook and Twitter in late January. Printed on cardboard, they measured three to four inches long and had black lettering. Sellers listed them for $ 20 to $ 60 each, with a discount on bundles of three or more. Laminate costs extra.
All were forgeries or counterfeit copies of the Centers for Disease and Prevention Centers, which are given to people vaccinated against Covid-19 in the United States.
“We have found hundreds of online stores selling the cards, and possibly thousands have been sold,” said Saoud Khalifah, founder of FakeSpot, which provides tools to detect fake offers and reviews online.
The coronavirus has made opportunists out of many people, such as those who stored bottles of hand sanitizer at the start of the pandemic, or those who deceived recipients from their stimulus checks. Now online fraudsters are linked to the latest lucrative initiative: the little white cards that provide proof of shots.
Online stores offering counterfeit or stolen vaccine tickets have been in dispute over the past few weeks, Mr. Khalifah said. The efforts are far from hidden, with Facebook pages called “wax cards” and eBay listings featuring “blank vaccine cards” publicly hawking the items.
Legal experts said the sale of fake vaccination cards could violate federal laws prohibiting the copying of the CDC logo. If the cards are stolen and filled in with fake numbers and dates, it can also violate the laws of identity theft.
But profits continued as demand for cards grew from anti-vaccine activists and other groups. Airlines and other companies recently said they need proof of Covid-19 vaccination so people can travel safely or attend events.
The cards can also be centralized in ‘vaccine passports’, which provide digital proof of vaccinations. Some tech companies that develop vaccine passports are asking people to upload copies of their CDC cards. Los Angeles also recently began using the CDC cards for its own digital proof of vaccination.
Last week, 45 state attorneys general banded together to call on Twitter, Shopify and eBay to stop selling fake and stolen vaccination cards. Officials said they were monitoring the activity and that they were concerned that people who had not been vaccinated were abusing the cards to attend large events, possibly spreading the virus and prolonging the pandemic.
“We see a huge market for these fake cards online,” said Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s attorney general. The office investigated fraud related to the virus. “It’s a dangerous practice that undermines public health.”
The CDC said it was “aware of cases of fraud involving counterfeit Covid-19 vaccine tickets.” It asked people not to share images of their personal information or vaccination cards on social media.
Facebook, Twitter, eBay, Shopify and Etsy have said that selling fake vaccine tickets violates their rules and removes messages that advertise the items.
The CDC introduced the vaccination cards in December, describing them as the ‘simplest’ way to keep track of Covid-19 shots. By January, sales of counterfeit vaccine tickets had begun to increase, Mr. Khalifah said. Many people found that the cards could be easily forged from samples that were available online. Authentic cards were also stolen from pharmacies and offered for sale by pharmacists, he said.
Many people who bought the cards were against the Covid-19 vaccines, Mr. Khalifah said. In some anti-vaccine groups on Facebook, people have publicly boasted about getting the cards.
“My body is my choice,” one commenter wrote in a Facebook post last month. Another person replied, “can’t wait to get mine too, lol.”
Other buyers want to use the cards to mislead pharmacists into giving them a vaccine, Mr. Khalifah said. Since some of the vaccines are two-course regimens, people may enter a false date for the first vaccination on the card, which makes it look like they will need a second dose soon. Some pharmacies and vaccination sites in the state have given people preference for their second shots.
One Etsy seller, who did not want to be identified, said she recently sold dozens of fake vaccine tickets for $ 20 each. She justified her actions by saying that they were helping people evade a ‘tyrannical government’. She added that she did not intend to be vaccinated.
Proponents of vaccines say they are concerned about the proliferation of counterfeit and stolen cards. To hold people accountable, Savannah Sparks, a pharmacist in Biloxi, Miss, started posting videos on TikTok last month with the names of the sellers of counterfeit vaccine tickets.
In a video, Mrs. Sparks explains how she tracked down the name of a pharmacy technician in Illinois who pinned several cards to herself and her husband and then posted about them online. The pharmacy technician did not reveal her identity, but linked the post to her social media accounts, where she used her real name. The video has 1.2 million views.
“It made me so angry that a pharmacist used her access and position in this way,” Sparks said. The video caught the attention of the Illinois Pharmacists Association, which said the video had been reported to a state council for further investigation.
Mrs. Sparks said her work attracted opponents and opponents against vaccines, which threatened her and posted her home number and address online. But she was untouched.
“They should be the first place to plead for people to be vaccinated,” she said of pharmacists. “Instead, they try to use their positions to spread fear and help people get the vaccine.”
Mr. Shapiro, the attorney general of Pennsylvania, said the sale of counterfeit and stolen cards, in addition to violating federal copyright laws, is likely to violate civil and consumer protection laws that require an article as advertised. The cards could also violate state laws on imitation, he said.
“We want to see them stop immediately,” he said. Shapiro said about the fraudsters. “And we want to see the companies act seriously and immediately.”