A booming black market has arisen around selling forged Covid certificates, exemplified by the 8,000 fake vaccine passes identified in eastern Switzerland in December.
Many forgeries are never discovered. And the illicit market keeps expanding, especially on dark net platforms, but also via the Telegram messaging app.
In Luxembourg, however, this does not yet appear to be a problem.
The Luxembourg Health Directorate and the CTIE, responsbible for the government’s IT, estimate that their system for producing the famous QR codes is safe, the responsible Commission at the Chamber of Deputies found on Tuesday.
“Every vaccine certificate issued in Luxembourg is based on the Matricule [the social security ID number]. This means it would be very hard to create fake certificates. What we have seen in other countries is not possible in Luxembourg,” said DP MP Carole Hartmann.
Besides, every certificate can be traced back to the person who has originally validated it.
This means there is a relatively low risk “that someone would issue a certificate as a favour,” said Diane Adehm, MP for the CSV. If a fake certificate were identified, it could be invalidated very quickly.
The CTIE has flagged problematic names in their system. Such certificates would be shown as red in the app, says Adehm, and only four such cases have occurred.
