Amid increasing reports of progress on vaccines worldwide, a new report of Checkpoint Research has revealed that fake covid-19 vaccines are being sold on the dark web. The company said they found multiple cases where people claimed to sell vaccines in exchange for Bitcoins, making them harder to trace.
“When researchers communicated with one vendor, they offered to sell an unspecified Covid-19 vaccine for 0.01 BTC (around US$300), and claimed that 14 doses were required. This advice contradicts official announcements, which state that some coronavirus vaccines require two shots per person, each administered three weeks apart,” the company said in a blog post.
Some sellers also claimed to have stock of newly approved vaccines from “leading pharmaceuticals”. Though the payments are always done using cryptocurrency, Checkpoint found that vaccines are being sold for $250 and above. “The range of medicines advertised by these vendors is extensive, from ‘available coronavirus vaccine $250’ to ‘Say bye bye to COVID19=CHLOROQUINE PHOSPHATE’ to ‘Buy fast. CORONA-VIRUS VACCINE IS OUT NOW’, and we have no way of knowing whether these are genuine,” the firm said in its blog post.
“Our data shows that since the beginning of November there were 1,062 new domains, which contain the word ‘vaccine’ that were registered, out of which 400 also contain ‘covid’ or ‘corona’. 6 of these sites were found to be ‘suspicious’,” the company said.
However, the experts and health organizations have been expecting such scams for a while now, and have issued warnings about the possibility of the same.
In fact, while misinformation about the worth of vaccines has been growing worldwide, some say India will have its own set of issues to deal with. “You’ll not see typical conspiracy theories here,” said Rakesh Dubbudu, co-founder of Factly, an International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) approved fact-checking organization. “What I suspect is a lot of misinformation around availability, black marketing, side effects, which could be very Indian in a sense and not in line with the global norms of misinformation,” he added.
While the dark web is tough to trace by the police, social media organizations, like Facebook and YouTube have been looking to stop the flow of misinformation on their platforms. In order to remove vaccine related misinformation, Facebook and YouTube have updated their content policies. Google has also added a new feature on Search last week, which will surface a list of authorized vaccines when people search for vaccines on the platform.
