People Are Photoshopping COVID Test Results to Bypass Travel Restrictions

[Celerity]

People are doctoring test results with Photoshop and Microsoft Paint.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/dy854a/people-are-photoshopping-covid-test-results-to-bypass-travel-restrictions



With the new, more transmissible UK COVID-19 variant now detected in over 60 countries and places like Portugal and Ireland reporting record deaths from the virus, governments around the world have begun requiring airline passengers to present a negative COVID-19 test result before boarding flights destined for their territories. The result is also usually required to be from a PCR test taken no more than 72 hours before the passenger’s flight. PCR tests are widely considered the ‘gold standard’ of virus testing and involve analysing genetic material from a nasal swab to detect whether a person has an active infection.

And yet, despite the pandemic and the fact that document forgery is in most countries a serious criminal offence (and a felony in the United States), some travellers are forging test results to get around travel restrictions anyways. Motherboard spoke with two people—both of whom asked to remain anonymous to avoid legal repercussions—who claimed to have successfully doctored or forged results.

“I just fired up photoshop and changed the date,” wrote one man who had doctored results for an entire group of friends to Motherboard. “Fun fact, the document [test result] was in French whereas they were in Sweden the day it was supposedly made, but they didn’t see a problem in that.” The other person took a slightly less sophisticated route and changed the date of an old test with Microsoft Paint for his vacation to Southern Europe.

The two aren’t alone. This week 40 travellers tried to present fake test results to get into Croatia, and earlier this year a Dutch teenager who had tested positive for the virus went a step further and falsified her result to escape quarantine in Switzerland. She was arrested just before boarding the plane. In the case of the two people Motherboard spoke to, the main reasoning for doctoring the documents was saving some cash. While PCR tests in European countries are free through the public healthcare system, most national health authorities intentionally refuse to provide patients with the medical certificates required to travel.

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[Initech]

1. What could possibly go wrong?