The UK is set to open foreign travel from Monday, which will be subject to a number of requirements for entry to the UK, including the number and types of tests and certificates.
The black market for pandemic related products, including fake negative Covid tests and fake vaccination certificates is booming.
Border officials have warned that an estimated 100 fake negative Covid tests were already being caught each day – before the borders are opened further for foreign travel.
What is required to enter the UK?
The details are to be confirmed but it’s expected that up to three polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests will be required: one before entry showing a negative result and up to two afterwards depending on the country from which a traveller has arrived.
PCR tests cost an average of £120 a test for each person.
What about other countries?
Countries have differing requirements, but some including EU states have said a requirement around vaccination will be required to enter them.
What do you need certificates for in the UK?
To enter the UK, certificates are needed to provide evidence of a negative Covid-19 test.
The test result must be in either English, French or Spanish.
Depending on the country of origin, up to two more tests could be required, both of which would need a certificate to prove a negative result.
What about vaccination?
The government has suggested it will incorporate a vaccination status into the existing NHS Covid app.
However, there are currently no requirements to prove vaccination status when entering the UK. The level of vaccination progress will be taken into account when determining how countries should be allocated
What checks are there?
Border Force officers at airports and ports are responsible for checking the certificates, although no specific training is provided.
Some Border Force officers said the certificates can be easy to spot as they often have spelling mistakes or punctuation errors. But as there is no single template for a negative test it can be challenging.
What is the scale of the use of fakes?
Border Force staff have said that by their nature it is challenging to estimate the true scale of the use of fake certificates.
However, union officials have said that at least 100 fake certificates are caught each day – equal to thousands a month.
Cybersecurity researchers said there were more than 1,200 vendors on the dark web offering fake certificates, vaccines, treatment drugs and protective equipment. Individual channels on encrypted messaging apps have more than 1,000 subscribers.
This content first appear on the guardian