29/11/2022
29/11/2022
Jamil Mohammad (a pseudonym), a 26 year old Yemeni young man lost his
job at a tailor’s shop because of the ban imposed due to the
Coronavirus pandemic. A year and a half after leaving work in the
Saudi city of Riyadh, he decided to return to his work there when the
Covid-19 pandemic began to recede.
Everything was going as he had planned except for the trouble of
obtaining a Covid-19 vaccine certificate without which he would not be
allowed to enter Saudi Arabia. This posed a big problem for a worker
who relies on daily income living in Raymah southwest of Sana’a. He
could not afford the travel costs to one of the governorates under the
control of the internationally recognized Yemeni government to receive
the vaccine there.
Instead, Jamil says that he had to purchase a forged vaccination
certificate from a travel agency specialising in all means of travel
based in the Yemeni capital Sana’a currently under the control of Al
Houthi, for 400 Saudi Riyals ($106). After that, Jamil managed to
complete his travel arrangements and arrived soon after to Saudi
Arabia without any problem.
Article (208) of the first chapter of the Law states that “Every
person who forges the seal of the state, the seal of the president
of the republic, or of a public employee or any entity whose
employees count as public employees shall be punished by
imprisonment for a period that does not exceed ten years. Any item
used as part of the affairs of this entity to mark documents
counts as a “seal.” A person who uses any of these aforementioned
items shall receive the same punishment. Moreover, whoever uses a
seal, or item and effectively harms the public or private goods
shall be punished by imprisonment for a period that does not
exceed two years. A person shall be exempted from punishment if he
reports perpetrators to the competent public authorities before
the crime takes place, before the search for the perpetrator
begins, or if he facilitates the capture of the perpetrators even
after the search for them starts”.
Concerning the forgery of official documents, Article (212) of the
second chapter of the same law states, “A person who forges an
official document or alters an actual official document to be used
in a context that bears legal consequences shall be punished by
imprisonment for a period that does not exceed five years. If this
is done by a public employee while he is doing his job, he may be
punished by imprisonment for a period that does not exceed seven
years.”
Article (213) of the same law states, “If a public employee in
charge of writing a document includes untruthful incidents or
circumstances or knowingly ignores to provide proof of actual
incidents or circumstances, that employee shall be punished by
imprisonment for a period that does not exceed seven years.”
Article (214) states, “Any public employee who commits a forgery
in an official document, even if he is not in charge of writing
it, shall be punished by imprisonment for a period that does not
exceed five years.”
The legal advisor Abdel-Rahman Al-Zubaib points out that forging the Covid-19 vaccine certificates or the signatures of the Ministry of Health officials is a criminal act classified as a “serious crime” for which perpetrators are punished by imprisonment. If an employee issues a vaccine certificate illegally, he is punished by imprisonment for a period not exceeding seven years while the prison sentence may reach ten years as a penalty for forging the seal of the Ministry of Health.
Travel or transport agencies provide electronic certificates of
vaccination in two ways. The first is through a certificate bearing
the QR code that leads to a forged website that mirrors the name and
interface of the platform of the Yemeni Ministry of Health. This was
designed to match the official website in every detail. Examining
both URLs show a difference in only one feature whereby the letter
(i) in the official website URL, is replaced by an (a) in the fake
one.
This type of certificate is less expensive, and travellers can
obtain them within two or three hours after submitting the
information to the travel agency or a broker. The price of one
certificate ranges from 200 to 400 Saudi Riyals, that is between $53
to $106 and the certificate data is often deleted from the site once
travellers arrive at their destinations.
While searching through open sources, a paid Facebook page caught
our attention, since it offered Covid-19 vaccine certificates (with
fake links) for 500 Saudi Riyals ($133). Such pages are a paid
category and last for a limited period of time before they are
deleted.
We sent an inquiry about the service through the message feature on
the page, and we received a prompt answer requesting the personal
data, the passport number, and promising to send the certificate’s
link the following morning. As a form of assurance, the person said
that the fee does not have to be paid until after the certificate
has been received and verified.
The second method affords the traveller an official certificate
issued by the Ministry of Health with a real number, but it is
usually granted even if the bearer never received a single
vaccination jab for a fee that is set between 400 and 700 Saudi
Riyals ($106 and $186). This process usually takes at least a day or
two.
The travel agency or the broker issues usually a signed receipt for
the traveller showing the amount paid for the vaccine certificate.
In some cases, the receipt refers to the certificate as “logistical
services” or “border transit”.
Under the pretext of obtaining some quotes to buy a certificate, we
visited twenty-six travel agencies in Sana’a 50th Street, 60th
Street, Al-Zubayri, Taiz Street and Al-Hasba. Twenty-two of them
were immediately ready to provide certificates with forged or
official numbers and at almost similar prices.
Such transactions are carried out in the open in Sana’a whose
government is currently under the control of Al Houthi. Similar
sales of forget vaccination documents exist in the parts of Yemen
controlled by the internationally recognized government, although
the process there is more discreet after contacting travel agencies
in the governorates of Taiz, Hadhramaut, and Marib.
The situation varies slightly in the city of Aden where travel
agencies are offering forged certificates to travellers without
needing to hide behind brokers maybe due to the lax security in that
part of Yemen.
We randomly chose three offices in Aden and inquired about the
possibility of obtaining official vaccination certificates, and all
three were keen to supply us with what we needed.
On August 4, 2021, the Ministry of Health announced that its
website had been hacked. This suspended its activity for three
days during which the hackers managed to steal some certificate
numbers. The Ministry of Health did not announce how many of these
were stolen.
Ahmad Al-Ta’zi is a pseudonym for the director of a travel agency
south of Sana’a. He describes that period saying, “We had an IT
engineer, or a hacker, who was able to hack a large number of
certificates for us. My office’s share of that was more than a
hundred certificates, but they were all cancelled. We made the
best profit in that period as we would sell each certificate for
700 Saudi Riyals ($186). We gave a percentage of it to the
engineer, and the rest was a net profit for the office.”
When the site was up again, it was more secure and could not be
hacked. According to Al-Ta’zi, the transport offices resorted to
coordinating with a network of brokers through whom they obtained
ready-made official certificates from the Ministry of Health for 300
Saudi Riyals ($80) each.
As for coordinating with the intermediary network and the identity
of the people involved, he clarifies that there is no specific
person but rather a chain like number of intermediaries. You might
contact one then they refer you to a second and perhaps to a third
or fourth person in order to cover up for the actual person or
official in charge. It is all done over the phone. In the end, what
matters to the travel office is to obtain the required number of
certificates.
To verify this part, we contacted brokers in Aden, Marib, Taiz,
Shabwa and Sei’hun and pretended that we wanted to trade in
certificates. They all confirmed their willingness to provide us
with official certificates, regardless of the quantity requested.
We also discovered that some of those brokers were employed in some
capacity with the Ministry of Health. One of those people whose
identity we confirmed was an employee of the Covid-19 project of the
Ministry of Public Health and Population. He said that he could
provide us with 200 to 300 official certificates at once whenever we
decided to buy them.
Until this point, it was possible to blame the availability of
official certificates on the black market due to the hacking
incident that lasted for 2 weeks. However, after the ministry’s
website came back on line, the certificates of vaccination kept
flowing in the market through travel agencies and brokers alike.
Network engineer Ammar Al-Falahi says, “What is suspicious is that
when the site was re-launched after the hacking incident, the
ministry did not make any changes to the certificates design, even
though it acknowledged that the site had been hacked. It would be
self-evident that the design should have been changed and that the
numbers of all new certificates saved on the site should have been
deleted. This reinforces the doubts that maybe the hack has been
fabricated to create chaos and conceal the matter specially that it
generates astronomical profits for some important people.”
We tried to communicate with officials in the Ministry of Public
Health and Population in more than one way by contacting Minister
Qassim Buhaibeh and Ali Al-Walidy, the Undersecretary of the
Ministry and the director of the Covid-19 project. We also contacted
Ishraq Al-Sibai’i, the spokesperson for the Supreme National
Committee to Counter the Virus to find about their views regarding
this matter and to give them the right to respond to the findings of
this investigation. To date, we have not received any response.
The original online link to the Coronavirus vaccine electronic certificate search system affiliated with the Yemeni Ministry of Health in Aden
The online link to the fake website which mirrors the name and interface with the Yemeni Ministry of Health
On the evening of December 3, 2021, Abdo Ahmad Al-Saidi and his
twelve companions, including three women arrived to the Al-Wadeeia
border crossing with Saudi Arabia in a four-wheel drive vehicle and
stayed there overnight. The next morning, they were scheduled for a
PCR test before crossing into Saudi.
Al-Saidi says, “Our turn came at 1:00 pm, but we were surprised
that our three female companions did not have vaccination
certificates as they believed that this requirement was specific
only to men. It didn’t take long for brokers and middlemen roaming
in plain sight around the cars and buses to offer us a solution.
Their offers were competitive. After five hours of waiting, the
women obtained three certificates issued by the Ministry of Health
for not more than 1,200 Saudi Riyals ($300). After that, we headed
directly to the border crossing.”
Al-Saidi says that the procedures at the Yemeni side of the crossing
were not complicated and did not take more than an hour. They match
the tests and vaccinations certificates of new travellers and
visitors and ask vaccinated Saudi residents for a copy of their data
on the ‘Tawakalna’ application as proof that they had received the
vaccine. Then, they stamp your passport and allow you to go through.
According to Al-Saidi, on the Saudi side of the crossing, the
procedures are limited to verifying travellers’ data on the
‘Tawakalna’ application on which passenger data is saved once it is
uploaded to the ‘Muqeem’ or residents’ platform. residents and
visitors register entry requests to Saudi territories through this
application.
Thousands of Yemeni travellers, especially those looking to work in
Saudi Arabia, resort to buying fake vaccine certificates to avoid
the costs and hardship of travelling to the parts of Yemen under the
internationally recognised government control to get vaccinated.
Sana’a and the northern parts of the country under the control of
the Al-Houthi group lack vaccine centres.
Like many of his counterparts in travel offices, Al-Ta’zi justifies
the fraud operation by describing it as a “benefit for all” since
most Yemenis are experiencing financial hardships, and it is
difficult for them to travel to other parts of the country to
receive the vaccine. This is in addition to the repeated mistakes
committed by vaccination centres in terms of entering a misspelt
name, or inputting the wrong passport numbers which could complicate
matters for the travellers.
Al-Ta’zi adds, “one of the reasons is that vaccine doses run out sometimes, as was the case with the AstraZeneca vaccine which started to be used at the beginning of July and until the end of September 2021. Many people’s businesses were impacted then, especially those who took the first dose of the vaccine and were scheduled to take the second one. This prompted travellers to rush to buy certificates from offices, especially in the case of expatriates whose visas were about to expire, which may have cost them a fine of more than 1,000 Saudi Riyals. ($270).”
Since the beginning of the last quarter of 2021, the demand for
certificates issued by the fake Ministry of Health has doubled and
caused a decline in the rate of demand for genuine certificates
issued legitimately.
Judging by what he sees at his work, Al-Ta’zi cites reasons
explaining that those who have residency in Saudi Arabia no longer
buy certificate numbers off the forged link unless they are
travelling for visiting purposes or going to a country other than
Saudi Arabia. He says that this is because residents must upload
their vaccination certificates to the Saudi Ministry of Health via
the ‘Muqeem’ or ‘residents’ platform for approval before travelling,
and it is likely that the Yemeni Ministry of Health is coordinating
with its Saudi counterpart in this regard.
These documented cases are of travellers whose circumstances and motives may not differ, and they flock to travel agencies offices and brokers to obtain forged certificates in all the governorates of Yemen on a daily basis which goes against the law and increases corruption.