Online Black Market for Fake Vaccination Certificates Still Booming
Bad actors have been making the most of the Covid-19 pandemic from its very onset. With the introduction of vaccines, while they were still in relatively short supply, scammers were focused on offering worried people fake "greenlight" vaccination opportunities. Now bad actors have shifted towards a new lucrative opportunity for illegal profit provided by the current situation.
Across the globe there is no small number of people who are unwilling to undergo Covid vaccination. This opens the door to scammers and fraudsters to offer fake vaccination documents and sell them online on the black market.
International travel requirements have been tightened across the globe and significant restrictions apply to those who are not vaccinated. Even on a regional level, countries have begun introducing local requirements and restrictions for those who are not vaccinated, including limited access to public events and venues.
Scammers are offering pretty much everything you might need, regardless of your country of residence, from US vaccination cards to European certificates of vaccination.
The black market websites that are peddling those fake vaccination documents are playing on the angle and the narrative that a lot of what you'd call "anti-vaxxers" want to hear - that they are doing their customers a "favor" by helping them not to "bend the knee" to authorities. This is often accompanied by false information about the vaccines being hazardous to human health and even "poisonous".
Different online forums are offering different certification documents for vaccination, including local certificates used only within the confines of a single country.
The reason why this sort of illegal business is able to flourish in the first place is twofold. On the one hand, the considerable volumes of false information that are being spread through social networks and other online channels, despite the best efforts of said networks, contribute massively to giving vaccination a "scare factor". On the other hand, there are already a great number of people who are firmly convinced that vaccination is harmful and no amount of medical or statistical data would persuade them otherwise.
