A couple from Roubaix will be tried in December, in Lille, for having sold around fifty fake health passes for 100 euros a piece on the Snapchat social network, the gendarmerie said on Thursday.
The gendarmes first spotted a questionable Snapchat account “at the end of the summer”, then managed to trace it back to its owners. A man in his thirties who worked in the restaurant business and his partner, explained Bertrand Michel, head of the Lille research section.
Real-fake passes registered with the Health Insurance
They then identified their customers, who paid via Paypal, working on “financial flows”, then checked with Health Insurance that they did not have real health passes. Three of them “for whom we were certain that they had indeed had a false health pass” are summoned for an admission of guilt.
The couple, meanwhile, must be tried on December 17 by the criminal court for “false” and for having entered false data into the Ameli information system. A little more than 5,000 euros were seized from his accounts.
According to the gendarmerie, the suspects operated in three ways. “Initially, they had a good plan to have” clean “health passes, registered in Ameli with the names of the clients”, he developed, either thanks to complicit practitioners, or by usurping identifiers. Then, “they were content to tweak QR codes on paper, usable to go to the restaurant” but which did not correspond to the correct identity. Finally, among the customers questioned by the gendarmes, some simply never received anything.