The online market for fake Covid-19 vaccination cards is booming.
Thousands of online sellers are claiming to offer near-perfect copies of the cards at prices that have risen sharply in recent weeks, with some now selling a single card for hundreds of dollars. While it’s unclear how many cards successfully make it to people who try to buy them, the federal government is intercepting reams of them.
A spokesperson for U.S. Customs and Border Protection said the agency has intercepted thousands of packages of fake cards from China that “we basically stopped keeping track, because there were so many.”
Almost all the seized packages came from Shenzhen, China, the spokesperson said.
The FBI warned in March that buying, creating or selling fake vaccination cards are illegal, and the agency has made at least one high-profile arrest of a Chicago pharmacist who was allegedly selling them on eBay. All major American social media and commerce sites, including Etsy, Facebook, Amazon and Twitter, have banned the sale of the cards.
But users offering cards for sale are rampant on the messaging app Telegram, headquartered in the United Arab Emirates, and which rarely moderates user content. While Telegram is still sparsely used in the U.S., it’s become more popular in the past year, especially with the far right. In January, its founder, Pavel Durov, announced the app had reached half a billion active users worldwide.