In Covid-Era Travel Scam, scammers offer false test results

“As long as travel restrictions are maintained due to the situation of Covid-19, it is very likely that the production and sale of false test certificates will prevail,” Europol, the European Union’s police agency, said this month. .

Allegations of Covid-19 test fraud have been spreading around the world. A man was arrested outside 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 fake certificates to travelers at Charles de Gaulle Airport near Paris. Police 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 on the phones of the suspects more than 200 fake certificates, which allowed people to fly internationally, according to French prosecutors.

In late January, police in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, said they arrested eight people who were allegedly involved in a scam to sell fabricated negative test results to travelers.

This month, Indonesian authorities arrested 15 people in a separate plan, accusing them of offering false results for about $ 70 each. Police say a former worker at the city’s Soekarno-Hatta International Airport health office got a paper copy of a negative test certificate and, from October, used it to print some 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 could not rely on the results of the country’s Covid-19 tests. Earlier this month, four-fifths of Indonesian workers who had provided Taiwanese authorities with test results showing they were free of the virus had tested positive for Covid-19 after being killed in Taiwan.

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

Indonesia’s government agency in charge of migrant workers ‘affairs said it would tighten monitoring of migrant workers’ evidence to prevent false evidence.

The potential for fraud is plentiful amid a set of international travel restrictions that have been adopted during the pandemic.

“The results of the paper tests are not only presented in different formats and languages, but can also be easily manipulated,” said Albert Tjoeng, a spokesman for the International Air Transport Association, which represents some 290 airlines throughout the world. He said check-in officers should “try to determine the authenticity of various non-standard proof documents presented to them by passengers.”

The problem does not have an easy solution. Some governments have warned of the action. Singapore, for example, says travelers producing 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 “legal liability.”

One effort to make the test verification process easier is CommonPass, a project supported by the nonprofit The Commons Project Foundation, which will ask each country to share testing and vaccination requirements for travelers. and the names of the facilities in which the authorities rely. to administer Covid-19 tests.

The designated facilities will enter Covid-19 test and vaccine information from travelers into data systems that CommonPass can access, which will allow people to share that data with airlines and border authorities. “It’s a way to effectively issue a certificate (a digital certificate, like a test certificate or a vaccination record), but in a way that is tamper-proof,” said Paul Meyer, chief executive of the Commons Project .

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

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

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

“Without the ability to rely on Covid-19 testing and finally vaccine records across international borders, many countries will feel compelled to withhold travel bans and mandatory quarantines as long as the pandemic persists,” he said. say Bradley Perkins, chief physician of the Commons Project and a former 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 to [email protected]