Originally published at: Two nurses in New York arrested for selling fake vaccine cards that allegedly brought in $1.5 million | Boing Boing
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I hope these treacherous ghouls get locked away from the rest of us for a long time. I also hope the authorities are able to track down their customers.
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They likely positioned themselves with the fake vaccine card list of people for future blackmail down the road. With that list you could milk/blackmail those anti-vaxx’ers crowd for sometime.
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They should lose their right to work in this profession for betraying public trust like this.
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All sixty to seventy thousand of them.
“Sarah Palin. Calling party of Sarah Palin…”
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Shocked!
Double shocked! Triple even!
Suffolk is a weird place. My in-laws live there (NYFD, similar spite for the civilization they’re sworn to protect). It’s basically 50% people who work in/for the city while resenting the fact that it’s both majority liberal and a majority minority city.
ETA: They are simultaneously the ones to scream-along with “New York, New York” at Yankees games.
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I saw that on Twitter, and someone suggested that they were probably selling fake vaccination cards to police officers.
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Certain jobs require a higher degree of public trust, like doctors, nurses, police, firefighters, etc. These people need to be held to higher ethical standard of behavior, and the punishments for violating it should be much higher as well. The charges against these nurses should have an automatic escalation of charges, and more severe punishments, because they aren’t just impacting the people they interact with, but are negatively impacting society as a whole.
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$1.5 Million???
They got greedy. Had they stopped at half of that or a fourth of that, they may have gotten away with it. 
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Shouldn’t it be one count per false entry? Seems like they’re getting off easy.
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…ah this answers my main question (“why would people pay so much when the cards are so trivial to forge?”)
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If those two are “smiling” in those mugshots, then I guess my wife is still smiling at me…
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Where are people cross-checking these in practice? Do employers get access to this thing? That seems a big HIPAA problem (although that can be waived, I guess). Here in the Bay Area I occasionally (a third?) of the time get asked for my vaxx card at a restaurant, but that’s it.
I assume it would be something similar to the vaccination records made available to schools and employers already. Much like how a lot of jobs require verification of a negative TB test.
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They need to throw the book at them. Hopefully, this book:
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I have heard this before for other crimes, and the explanation I heard, and it’s one that I can not remember the source of, so it may be incorrect, is that a prosecutor may not bring full charges for a couple of reasons. The first reason is in terms of sentencing. If it is likely that a person will serve consecutive time for each charge, then they may hold off on the additional charges until the person is released from prison. The second reason is in terms of winning. If they are concerned with the evidence available at the time, they may hold off on additional charges so that they can have multiple efforts.
Perhaps someone that works in the legal field can verify that, otherwise, take it with a grain of salt because I’m at work and can’t verify a source for that info.
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I read that they were stuck with ~$900,000 in cash. (That’s a lot of non-jabs!)
They should have bought a nail salon or car wash.
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While vaccinated people can get and spread covid, I wonder how many of the people who got covid after supposedly being vaccinated weren’t actually vaccinated. Between this and the fake testing company that gave out negative results before you even got tested, it feels like conservatives in elected office - you break everything and then say, “see, I told you it doesn’t work!”
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It can also be about proof and evidence. A prosecutor may have good evidence on a lesser charge but not enough for a higher crime. So they file on the lesser charge, which gives more flexibility in terms of warrants and further investigation. It also opens up the possibility of convening a grand jury, which can issue subpoenas for information otherwise difficult to obtain (like state vaccination records). If a prosecutor tries to file higher charges without enough cause, a defense attorney can get the case dismissed.
These prosecutors might also be sorting out how to charge under the new law about falsifying vaccination cards and related computer tampering. They might only be able to charge under that statute for the false entries after December. Which means finding out how many.
Also forgery in the 1st degree is a Class C felony
Offering a false instrument in the 1st degree is a Class E felony
No exactly chump change and it stops them from doing more in the meantime.
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And he is most likely unvaccinated but kept his job with a fraudulent card.
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