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Warning app: No loophole for fake certificates
Photo: Oliver Berg / dpa
In the past there were "a few pharmacies" that "issued fake vaccination certificates," according to a statement from the federal government. A particularly drastic example of this was the arrest of a pharmacy employee in Munich in October. She is accused of producing hundreds of fake QR codes for the digital corona vaccination card together with accomplices and selling them on the Internet. Unit price: 350 euros. In October alone, the counterfeiters are said to have issued more than 500 vaccination certificates.
Exactly such fake certificates have been recognized by the Corona warning app since the latest update.
Specifically, this works from version 2.13.3 for Android and 2.13.2 for iPhones.
However, the app does not use sophisticated methods to detect counterfeits.
Rather, the identifiers of the pharmacies that have become known to have issued counterfeits are generally declared invalid in the app.
Honest users are also affected
As a result of this procedure, not only buyers of fake vaccination certificates are affected, but also people who have had a vaccination certificate correctly issued in the pharmacies in question with a real vaccination certificate and a vaccination certificate.
Their certificates are now also marked as invalid in the Corona Warning app.
The certificates are only checked on the users' smartphones, so no data is sent.
If the app detects a certificate as being forged, the user is informed of this via a push message.
Neither the federal government nor the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) provide any information on how many people are affected.
Users who experience this "can have a new digital certificate issued free of charge at another pharmacy," according to the Federal Government's statement.
You have to bring your yellow vaccination certificate and photo ID with you.
Vaccination refusals, who now believe that they can avoid the new procedure by not installing the update of the Corona warning app in question, are mistaken.
Because not only the warning app, but also the CovPassCheck app, with which club or restaurant operators, for example, check digital vaccination certificates, have been detecting the fakes since their most recent update.