In the course of the corona pandemic, more and more people are forging vaccination cards, as the police in Lower Saxony and Bremen report. She warns against publishing vaccination cards on the Internet.
The security authorities in Lower Saxony and Bremen are registering more and more procedures for falsified vaccination certificates. “The number of cases of false vaccination certificates identified by the Lower Saxony security authorities has increased continuously and up to December 2021,” said Katrin Gladitz, spokeswoman for the State Criminal Police Office (LKA) in Hanover.
According to preliminary figures, the LKA Lower Saxony is assuming cases in the lower four-digit range for the whole of 2021. In Bremen, the police have so far registered 190 criminal charges for counterfeit vaccination cards. “The criminal charges are constantly increasing, two months ago we determined eleven cases,” said a spokesman.
According to the LKA, the procedures in Lower Saxony are about blank vaccination cards and total forgeries. The exact number of fake vaccination cards in the state is not known. In its provisional recording, the LKA shows so-called cases of arrest. According to the LKA, such a stop can include a large number of forged vaccination cards.
Hanover/Bremen: False IDs are noticed in pharmacies
According to the investigators, the majority of cases in Lower Saxony are found when they are presented in pharmacies when a digital vaccination certificate is to be issued with the passport. Recently, however, cases have also become increasingly known, with false vaccination cards or vaccination certificates being shown in restaurants, swimming pools or brothels, for example, the LKA spokeswoman said.
The officials emphasize that the preparation for the production of a false vaccination certificate is already a punishable offence. Not only the seller, but also the buyer of such a document is liable to prosecution. The police also warn against publishing photos of vaccination cards, for example with recognizable batch numbers, on social media on the Internet. Such images could be used by fraudsters to create fake vaccination cards, it said.
Practice employee was caught in Bremen as a counterfeiter
According to the Lower Saxony Ministry of Health, particularly serious cases of forgery can result in penalties of up to five years in prison. Anyone who fails to document a vaccination correctly, incompletely or in good time can pay a fine of up to 2,500 euros. It is also a punishable offense to present a fake vaccination certificate.
A suspected counterfeiter was recently caught in Bremen. The 29-year-old worked in a group practice and had access to vaccine doses, stickers with the batch numbers and blank vaccination cards. During a search of the apartment, the officers confiscated 14 blank vaccination books, 74 batch stickers, three vaccination books that had already been counterfeited and three stamps that were stolen from the practice in autumn 2021. Investigations into theft and commercial forgery of documents are ongoing.
A dpa survey of Lower Saxony public prosecutors at the beginning of January revealed that the authorities are running hundreds of cases on suspicion of fake vaccination cards. There are around 130 procedures in Osnabrück. In the state capital of Hanover, too, the number of procedures is in the lower three-digit range. About 30 procedures are being conducted in Oldenburg for this reason.
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