Five members of a network for the manufacture and resale of fake health passes, which had made nearly 400,000 euros in revenue, were sentenced on Wednesday in Nanterre to sentences ranging from 10 to 24 months suspended prison sentence, including 8 months closed.
During an appearance hearing on prior recognition of guilt, the Nanterre Criminal Court sentenced them in particular for offenses related to fraudulent access to medical databases or the introduction of data into them, fraud and organized money laundering.
The highest sentence was pronounced against a woman, aged 24 and with a clean record.
More than 12,000 euros had been found at his home.
She had claimed in audition to have won “40,000 euros, easy” and to have learned thanks to a video on YouTube, recalled the president at the hearing on Wednesday.
The five members also received fines of up to 60,000 euros, including 40,000 euros suspended, and will have to compensate the health professionals who have filed civil suits.
Five other people will be tried in January
The investigations, carried out from August 2021 following anonymous information, had made it possible to identify eleven people for acts committed between May and November 2021. The members of the network disseminated “anti-vaccine” messages from accounts Snapchat, and offered fake health passes between 250 and 330 euros.
"I contacted a person who managed one of these Snapchat accounts first to get me a false pass personally", explained at the end of the hearing a retailer in her thirties from Paris suburbs.
Unemployed at the time, she confided that she bought around twenty passes to resell them for 70 euros more expensive, during the summer of 2021. She was sentenced to 18 months in prison suspended and 30,000 euros fine, including 7 000 suspended.
Members of the network collected the names and Social Security numbers of purchasers and hacked into the vaccine database.
The investigators had estimated the total amount of receipts at 396,000 euros by adding the lines of an accounts journal found in a man, who will be tried with four other people in Nanterre at the end of January.
