Dumb question of the day… why are fake CDC vaccination cards a marketable item? “Fake Vaccine Card Sales Have Skyrocketed Since Biden Mandate” (Pew):
The price of fake COVID-19 vaccine cards and the number of vendors selling them have shot up since President Joe Biden announced his vaccine mandate plan last week, according to a global cybersecurity company.
Check Point Software Technologies found that the typical cost of phony vaccine cards bearing the logo of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was $100 on Sept. 2. The day after Biden’s Sept. 9 announcement, they jumped to $200, according to company spokesperson Ekram Ahmed.
The estimated number of sellers also rose from about 1,200 to more than 10,000 during that period, added Ahmed, whose company has been studying the black market for fake vaccine cards.
The CDC makes a PDF for a blank card available on its web site. The information on the card can be written in by hand. A person who wanted to make his/her/zir/their own card would not even need to buy card stock because he/she/ze/they would generally be able to show a photo of a card rather than the card itself, e.g., to get into a restaurant in Washington, D.C. Clinic site and lot numbers can be copied from a card image found on the Web and/or from a friend’s legit card.
Why are people paying $200 for something that can be easily created at home? What is the skill of the referenced “black market” vaccination card vendors?
(And, given the state of American electronic medical records, how would it be possible to determine that a card was fake if the bearer copied lot numbers and clinic names from a legit card? (my booster shot record just says “CVS” in the right hand column, which could be anywhere in the U.S.) Even if the injection can’t be found in a database, should we infer from that missing record that the card is fake? How do we know that the people at the CVS did all of the upstream tasks correctly?)
First approximation answer(s)/guess(es): most people were not reading this blog and my post about those cards back in March/April of 2021 when I pointed out some of these things. Or 2) they actually believe in the provenance of the cards and their “difficulty” in forging and therefore the scalpers can convince them they’re getting something that required some “work” to achieve or 3) they can’t think well enough to understand any of the above, want a card and have $200 in stimulus money laying around and/or 4) they want to be able to claim they didn’t make the card, someone else did – and finger them if there is a crackdown on that behavior.
I think some combination of all the above is likely. For example, I remember a time when it was relatively easy to make a fake ID for the purposes of illicit alcohol purchasing and getting into clubs, before the days of holograms and other anti-counterfeiting ID techniques. Despite the fact that all you really needed was an HP laser printer using PCL or PostScript, some card stock and a laminating machine along with a photograph, most people paid someone else to do it because they didn’t even possess those rudimentary skills.
People are LAZY and they also probably figure: this other dude has it figured out, why sweat my muscles and screw it up somehow? $200 seems cheap by comparison.
BTW I won’t reproduce the link to my card – which I still have – because I don’t want to encourage the behavior or be blamed for it. But at the time I got mine I was shocked at how easy it would be. It’s just 65 or maybe 80lb matte cover stock. I was not able to discern any anti-counterfeiting whatsoever, including subtle backside or watermark printing. And there were no barcodes or QR codes or GUIDs that could be generated at the time they were issued, printed on the card right as you get one, and then matched against a database (which itself could be defeated but at least it would add an extra degree of difficulty.)
I guess because most people are too stupid to figure out where to buy card stock and how to make both sides of the card to align (one sure-fire way of spotting a fake card is just looking at it against bright light).
Oh, and VAERS is a veritable source of valid batch numbers. If you don’t mind having morbid thoughts afterwards.
Do the cards even have a back side?
@Scott Poppenhagen: Yes. And judging from the “feel” of mine, it was laser printed (you can feel the toner stack fused to the paper) not offset printed. But that may have changed at some point.
The fact that mine appears to be laser printed suggests that there may actually be an anti-counterfeiting system because it is relatively well-known in the world of bulk printing that laser print engines can be (and often are) engineered to lay down an almost invisible pattern of pixels that are basically invisible to the naked eye and appear random but in fact are not random and are specific to the print engine. Same goes for inkjet machines.
@averros, @SP: In other words, there may be (and probably is) a forensic way to discern “fake” from “real” but the specifics of that are guesswork. The card appears at first glance to be very easily duplicable. I wonder if we will discover in the fullness of time that it is not.
Well, I think a well-made fake card (i.e. some attention is paid to little details such as paper quality, size (must be 3×4″) , and alignment) is indistinguishable from the “real” cards, most of which appear to be printed on laser printers.
Given that most professional laser printers leave a pattern of yellow dots identifying the printer on everything they print, I guess forensics is possible. Now, I’m not sure if anyone would bother doing that.
A propos: states do have vaccination databases, but the quality of data in those is abysmally low. It’s quite possible to argue that the record is missing from the database because of that, as long as batch, date, and provider are a plausible combination. Batch sizes are quite large – 100k or even a million doses per batch, so if you check VAERS you will see reports with the same batch # from all over the country.
It is even easier to counterfeit than everyone is thinking. When I got my vaccine card, I made a reduced size photo copy and laminated it in plastic, so I could carry it in my wallet. I started by carrying both the reduced copy and the original copy, but only showed the reduced copy to see if it would be accepted. Since the copy is laminated inside plastic, it is not possible to confirm the paper it is printed on. The printing and handwriting on this copy also look poor.
I live in California, have been in and out of the US and various countries in Europe, to many places in and out of the US requiring proof of vaccination such as restaurants, workplaces, jobsites, old folks homes, etc. The reduced size copy has only been rejected in one case: for entry to a Stanford football game being held outdoors in fall 2021.
Heh. And of course, in addition to all the above (including front/back registration problem that @averros mentions) we could also imagine:
At some point the authorities are so swamped with fake vaccine proof cards and dealers of such they have to admit “defeat” and then – my goodness – the only alternative is…
RFID Chips in everyone’s necks! Just like Snake Plisskin!
https://youtu.be/kq40YyPo7io?t=137
Off topic, but of interest (#florida #miamibeach #helicopters #r44): Not the best autorotation, but everyone lived …
Is it bad that I’m going the other way? I want to sell positive COVID tests, so people can document a reason to get out of things like weddings they don’t want to go to.
“Why are people paying $200 for something that can be easily created at home? What is the skill of the referenced “black market” vaccination card vendors?” – that’s why Biden administration is again importing foreign students. I recall observing a foreign student’s creative use of a printer and a copier, long time before Photoshop..
interesting, here in India, the certs are available from the Cowin portal (https://www.cowin.gov.in/), from there they can be downloaded on the phone.
they can also be verified via the QR code: https://verify.cowin.gov.in/
no need to carry a physical vaccine card.
I’ve been double-vaxed (April 2021) and boosted (June 2022) and have never been asked about my vax status or asked to produce my vax card. I think it’s stuffed in my desk at the office. However, I haven’t left the state of Florida over the past ten years.
Time travel much?