Many people feel compelled to share their joy online when they got vaccinated for COVID-19. You have probably seen some of your friends post pictures of their vaccine cards on social media. This is a dangerous trend.

Pictures of vaccine cards make it easy for scammers to replicate the paper cards and copy some of the vital information on the card which makes a fake card look legitimate.

When Good Morning America did an online search for fake vaccine cards, they were surprised at how easy they were to find on sites like ebay and OfferUp. These websites are doing their best to remove listings for the fake cards, but it is a challenge to catch them all.

Fake vaccine cards are illegal to buy or sell, but that doesn’t seem to be stopping people from creating them. Watch the video below for more about this new type of scam.

Alyssa Miller is a cybersecurity expert who specializes in protecting large organizations. She explained to NBC News why a vaccine card is so easy to reproduce. “It’s a cardboard paper card. There’s absolutely nothing about it that would prevent you from reproducing it. How are you going to make someone at the opposite end, the ones who are supposed to be verifying these, to look at one and determine if it’s legitimate or if it’s fake?”

Not only is the card printed on a piece of paper, but the information on the card is often written by hand. That makes it especially easy to fake. It seems there has to be a more secure way to prove that you really have been vaccinated.

Do you think a digital verification that you’ve been vaccinated would be better than a paper card? Does it surprise you that there are vaccine card scammers out there? Why would someone want a fake vaccine card?