Thirteen frontline nursing home and hospital workers have been charged with buying fake COVID-19 vaccine cards from a fraud ring in New York, Manhattan’s top prosecutor said Tuesday.
A New Jersey woman operating as “AntiVaxMomma” on Instagram targeted her trade to anti-vaccine healthcare workers, selling about 250 cards for $200 each, District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. said.
For an extra $250, a second scammer entered some buyers’ names into a New York state vaccination database, which feeds electronic pass systems used to verify vaccinations — now needed to access restaurants, gyms and other public spaces in New York City.
“We will continue to safeguard public health in New York with proactive investigations like these, but the stakes are too high to tackle fake vaccination cards with whack-a-mole prosecutions,” Vance said in a news release. “We need companies like Facebook to take action to prevent the fraud happening on their platforms. Making, selling, and purchasing forged vaccination cards are serious crimes with serious public safety consequences.”
Facebook owns Instagram, the social media platform through which the ring largely operated, according to Vance.
Vance’s statements echo concerns of state Attorney General Letitia James, other law enforcement officials and lawmakers nationwide who have criticized the card’s easily forged paper format and warned against scams.
Prosecutors allege the New York ring started in May; in mid-August, outgoing Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) mandated vaccines for all nursing home workers, with first doses required by Sept. 27.
The district attorney’s office said it identified healthcare workers in the ring through Instagram messages they allegedly exchanged with ringleader Jasmine Clifford, 31, of Lyndhurst, NJ, and matched them against New York State professional licensing databases.
Most of those individuals are charged with one count each of conspiracy in the fifth degree and criminal possession of a forged instrument in the second degree. One man is also charged with offering a false instrument for filing in the first degree for paying to be entered in the state database.
Several, including a co-conspirator who offered to enter falsified data into the state database while working at a medical clinic, were arraigned Wednesday and released without bail until their next court appearance in October. It was unclear Wednesday whether any employers had been notified of the charges.
An arrest warrant was issued for Clifford, but she hadn’t been detained by Wednesday afternoon.
The ring fell apart after a New York state police investigator contacted Clifford to order a fake card and asked to be added to the state vaccine database, prosecutors said. He received his card and screenshots of his fake database information in July, Vance said.
