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Vaccination opponents deal with fakes 2G, warns the police
Photo: Friso Gentsch / dpa
The illegal trade in counterfeit vaccination certificates is flourishing.
In the past few weeks, the number of documented cases has gone through the roof, reports "Welt am Sonntag".
In eleven state criminal police offices alone, more than 2500 cases have become known since the beginning of the year, most of them only recently.
The number of unreported cases is likely to be much higher.
Parallel to the introduction of 2G rules in many places, which allow access to public places only for vaccinated and convalescent people, the number of fake vaccination certificates, especially on the Internet, has increased dramatically.
Bavaria reported a particularly large number of cases, half in November alone.
In the meantime, the fakes are not only offered in closed, lateral thinker groups, for example at Telegram, but also quite openly on platforms such as Instagram.
The operators of the counterfeit workshops would often respond to contact requests within a few minutes, reports the "Welt am Sonntag".
For each false proof, 200 euros would be called, payable by transfer or in Bitcoin.
Advertisements placed on Instagram promise to receive a "digital Covid-19 vaccination card without receiving the vaccine".
The parent company Facebook told the newspaper that trading in forged documents was prohibited on the company's platforms.
Reported advertisements would be removed.
The police apparently have trouble tracking down the perpetrators and are asking for the help of the population: With the "multitude of existing messenger and social media channels and in view of the dynamic situation", the police authorities "are hardly able to do all of them to know about criminal offers in order to initiate police measures to identify the perpetrators «.
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Joachim Herrmann (CSU), Interior Minister of Bavaria
Photo: Lino Mirgeler / picture alliance / dpa
Bavaria's Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann (CSU) warned that buying falsified vaccination certificates was not a minor offense.
"Because of the incalculable risk of infection, these people are putting the lives of others at risk." Rightly there was a threat of high penalties, including imprisonment.
Pharmacies, where vaccination certificates can be transferred to the Corona apps, also report a significant increase in the number of counterfeits presented.
Thousands of preliminary investigations are already underway.
Here, however, there may be a »criminal liability gap«, according to the Osnabrück regional court.
Anyone who presents a forged health certificate to authorities or insurance companies is liable to prosecution, as do doctors and other persons entitled to vaccinate if they forge such documents.
However, if a private person creates and presents the fake proof, the criminal liability does not apply to pharmacies because these are classified as private companies.
"That was basically a serious failure of the legislature," said the Mainz criminal law professor Volker Erb already at the beginning of November of the ARD.
“I can't understand how this glitch came about with the legislature.
What happened there seems downright amateurish to me. «The mistake happened in the adjustment of the Infection Protection Act in the spring.
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