In Covid-Era Travel Scam, Scammers Offer Fake Test Results

“As long as travel restrictions remain in place due to the Covid-19 situation, it is highly likely that the production and sale of bogus test certificates will prevail,” said Europol, the EU police agency European this month.

Allegations of Covid-19 test fraud are growing around the world. A man was arrested outside London 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 false certificates to travelers at Charles de Gaulle airport near Paris. Police first learned of the fraud after discovering a passenger with a fake certificate on a flight to Addis Ababa in Ethiopia. After the arrests, police found more than 200 fake certificates on suspects’ phones, which allowed people to steal abroad, according to French prosecutors.

In late January, police in Indonesia’s 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 that month arrested 15 people under a separate program, accusing them of offering false results for around $ 70 each. Police say a former health unit worker at the city’s Soekarno-Hatta International Airport got hold of an electronic copy of a negative test certificate and, as of October, had it. used to print approximately 20 forged test results per day.

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

Taiwan banned Indonesian migrant workers in December, saying it couldn’t trust the country’s Covid-19 test results. Earlier that month, four-fifths of Indonesian workers who provided Taiwanese authorities with test results showing they were not infected with the virus then tested positive for Covid-19 after being sampled in Taiwan .

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

The Indonesian government agency that deals with the affairs of migrant workers has said it will step up monitoring of migrant workers’ tests to avoid false tests.

The potential for fraud is pervasive in a patchwork of international travel restrictions that were enacted during the pandemic.

“The results of the paper tests are not only available in different formats and languages, but they can also be easily manipulated,” said Albert Tjoeng, spokesperson for the International Air Transport Association, which represents around 290 airlines in the world. He said check-in officers should “try to determine the authenticity of several non-standard test documents that passengers present to them.”

The problem has no easy solution. Some governments have warned against action. Singapore, for example, says travelers who produce fake test certificates will face restrictions on their ability to reside in the city-state in the future, while the Chinese government has warned of “liability. legal ”.

CommonPass, a project supported by the nonprofit The Commons Project Foundation, where each country will be invited to share their testing and vaccination requirements for travelers, as well as the names of facilities to which authorities are trusted to administer Covid-19 tests.

Designated facilities will then enter travelers’ Covid-19 testing and vaccination information into data systems accessible by CommonPass, allowing individuals to share that data with airlines and border authorities. “It’s a way to efficiently issue a certificate – a digital certificate, like a test certificate or vaccination record – but in a tamper-proof manner,” said Paul Meyer, general manager of the Commons project.

The CommonPass was tested on several international flights last year, and Project Commons says it coordinates its efforts with more than 20 governments.

IATA says it is also developing a mobile app, called the IATA Travel Pass, which will allow passengers to share test results with authorities in a way that the association says will make traveling with bogus nearly impossible. documents.

But getting all countries to accept the same digital passes is a challenge, creating obstacles in an already difficult travel regime.

“Without the ability to trust Covid-19 tests – and possibly vaccine registries – across international borders, many countries will feel compelled to maintain comprehensive travel bans and mandatory quarantines as long as the pandemic persists” said Bradley Perkins, Project Commons chief medical officer 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 at [email protected]