With darknet flooded with fake Covid-19 vaccination certificates, Russia’s Kaspersky Lab says it knows one solution

A new spike in the trade of phony Covid-19 papers has been observed on the Dark Web, Kaspersky Lab’s security researcher Dmitry Galov has observed. The new peak was apparently triggered by the people’s “will to travel more freely, because countries are currently implementing different IT services that are info-checking whether you’re vaccinated or not,” the key man at the Moscow-based firm said.

The online black market is flooded with fake Covid-19 pass advertising, with documents touted as having legitimate QR codes being offered for an average payment of $300.

“We see that cyber criminals are developing advertisements they place in the dark market. In them they say that the people can chose what vaccine, what fake vaccination they want to have,” Galov said.

They say that those certificates will be issued in some western European countries and they say that it will be possible to check them in any official application, such as CovPass, CoviCheck and so on.

Those promising to forge such documents, however, are likely just scammers who will get you a fake certificate that will fail any checks, or get you nothing at all, Galov warned.

“There’s no way to check whether these cyber criminals are just scammers who are trying to take money from their victims and give nothing back or they are actually having some kind of access or a way to send these kind of certificates. But that doesn’t matter, because doing that puts users under risks,” he said.

Tracing pure-bred fraudsters who seek only to strip gullible people from their funds is extremely difficult, given that they favor crypto currencies, secure messengers, and do not actually leave anything to be analyzed, the researcher explained. Those who might have access to databases and algorithms, however, would provide certificates that, in theory, can be traced to the source of the leak, Galov believes.

The Dark Web market for fake Covid-19 passes will remain in place as long as there’s a demand for them, the researcher argued. A universal recognition of all the existing coronavirus vaccines worldwide would help to mitigate the problem, Galov thinks.

This will affect the black market, because people who have been vaccinated, who have [taken] a shot of whatever they have in their country, they won’t be trying to buy a certificate that is related to another [country].