By: News On 6
Criminals are looking to cash in on the U.S. immunization push against COVID-19 by selling forgeries of government-issued vaccination record cards that show people have been inoculated.
Hundreds of fraudsters are selling blank or forged versions of the cards over ecommerce sites including eBay, Etsy and Shopify, while also running advertisements for the fakes on Facebook, according to Saoud Khalifah, CEO of Fakespot, which uses artificial intelligence to detect online retail scams. And with names such as blankcovidcard.com, such sellers are hardly discreet. In January we started noticing Shopify stores selling fake vaccination cards, and that was really interesting because it introduced a new dynamic to society where people can counterfeit immunity and interplace it with a fake card, Khalifah told CBS MoneyWatch. It s a new concept we haven t seen before.