![]() Authorities have been warning about the rise in pandemic-related fraud for months.įake vaccine cards not only have a negative impact on public health, the FBI said, but they're against the law - unauthorized use of an official government agency's seal can be punished with a fine or up to five years in prison. "In this case, we have removed the items and taken action on the bad actors involved in bypassing our controls."Įtsy didn't immediately respond to NPR's requests for comment.Ī black market for fake vaccination cards has grown in the waning days of the pandemic in the U.S. We have proactive measures in place to prevent prohibited products from being listed and we continuously monitor our store," an Amazon spokesperson said in an email to NPR. "We do not allow the products in question in our store. “If they actually go the route of trying to make this ‘mandatory,’ this will become one of the most forged documents in history,” reads the top comment on one of the posts directing users to forge cards.Other vendors selling fake vaccine cards have cropped up on Etsy, an e-commerce site focusing on handmade and vintage items on pro-Trump forums and on the dark web, according to recent reports. On pro-Trump forums like Patriots.Win where the forgeries run rampant, conspiracy theories about the vaccine and government control are the norm, not the exception. Polling has shown vaccine hesitancy is most prevalent among Republican men, with one Monmouth University poll from April 14 showing 43 percent of Republicans saying they would never receive the shot. Some users have created archives of the documents using instant archival services like archive.is, which users now link to directly, along with the forgery instructions. Still, the templates now proliferate online. ![]() We don't know how long this is going to last." "If is just a short-term solution for how we temporarily navigate the world and get back to resuming our normal, then it is probably adequate. "Paper is always going to be less of a risk for unintended compromise of anything digital," she said. But that requires longer-term planning for a vaccine response that's largely created in real time, said Eva Velasquez, the president of the Identity Theft Resource Center, a victim advocacy organization. One alternative is allowing vaccine distributors, such as state governments and pharmacies, to print official cards with more built-in safeguards, more akin to a driver's license. "I think this is a good example of that." You know sometimes when you're looking at smart technology, and you're like, 'Does that really need to be smart? Was that a thing that I needed in my life?'" she said. ![]() "We have an analog system that works for the purposes of what we're doing. "Setting up massive systems for tracking folks, collecting their information, and then with no kind of exit plan, how is that data going to be treated?" she said. More programs like New York's Excelsior program - so far the only statewide smartphone app that functions as a vaccine passport - would create more ways for individuals' data to be monitored, said Hayley Tsukayama, a legislative activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights nonprofit. "The initial goal for posting the document was to make things a little easier for community providers," a department spokesperson said.ĭespite how easy the cards are to forge, digital privacy advocates say that a paper-based system is still preferable to a central online database or smartphone app. Wyoming’s Health Department also confirmed its template was removed April 1, citing "misuse." "CDC has consistently advised states not to post the vaccine card template publicly," CDC spokesperson Kate Grusich said in a statement. The CDC has since delivered guidance to states to pull the templates from their sites, citing “misuse” by the anti-vaccine community, according to state officials. On conspiracy and anti-government forums throughout the web, users have linked to card templates that were left visible on the websites of state governments, including high-resolution PDFs from the websites of both the Wyoming and Missouri health departments. In March, the FBI released a public warning that creating or buying a fake vaccine card is illegal. "How are you going to make someone at the opposite end, the ones who are supposed to be verifying these, to look at one and determine if it's legitimate or if it's fake?" she said. ![]() "There's absolutely nothing about it that would prevent you from reproducing it." "It's a cardboard paper card," said Alyssa Miller, a cybersecurity expert who specializes in protecting large organizations.
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