Vaccinate
The anti-fraud authority of the EU is sounding the alarm: More and more fraudsters are trying to make big money with a non-existent vaccine.
EU investigators are observing more and more scams in the swept market for corona vaccines. Intermediaries have offered governments a total of 900 million doses of vaccine for 12.7 billion euros in the past few weeks, the EU anti-fraud authority Olaf told the German Press Agency in Brussels on Thursday. The federal government and the state of North Rhine-Westphalia also received dubious offers, but turned them down.
The 27 EU states had agreed to have the corona vaccine procured jointly via the EU Commission in Brussels. At the moment, however, the quantities supplied under the joint agreements are scarce everywhere in the EU. The manufacturers justify this with the slowly increasing production.
“We are seeing a growing number of scams and fake offers in connection with vaccines,” said the Olaf press office. The anti-fraud agency claims to have received information from many governments through intermediaries who tried to sell large quantities of vaccines approved in the EU. The clues have increased significantly since Olaf warned against such fraud attempts.
The aim of the fraudsters is to persuade the authorities to make a large down payment for the business and then use the money to get rid of them. The same scam was used last year for protective clothing. “The brokers stand for opportunistic companies that were inactive until recently or have traded in completely different goods,” the spokesman continued. The headquarters of the companies are often outside the EU, which makes them difficult to identify. Olaf relies on the exchange of information about suspicious transactions and has asked all EU countries to report such offers.
EU officials had put the sum of the dubious offers on Thursday morning at 400 million cans. In the evening Olaf gave the updated number. “We call that ghost vaccines, that is, any more or less obscure offers that have probably already gone to many heads of state and government,” said the EU Commission. Nobody knows exactly whether it is a real vaccine. It could also be “salt water in small bottles”.
