Our colleagues from France Info have investigated a huge traffic of fake sick leaves that are developing on Snapchat. The scammers sell falsified certificates there, bearing the names of real doctors whose identity they usurp. The medical community seems completely overwhelmed by events.
We knew the Snapchat facilitator of drug sales, we knew less about the Snapchat spotting crooks with fake sick leaves. However, it is a whole traffic that has developed on the social network, as revealed by our colleagues from France Info. To find these resellers of a new kind, a simple search within the application is enough. It remains to choose from the multitude of accounts that promote fake sick leaves.
For a handful of euros, between 15 and 30 according to France Info, you can buy the services of these more or less amateur counterfeiters. Some meet in your city for a personal delivery, others even have the luxury of calling on “delivery men”. All of them, however, have one thing in common: they claim to have a network of doctors capable of providing them with sick leave, for the reason and duration desired by the client and within unbeatable deadlines.
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Doctors warn against the epidemic of false sick leaves
Of course, it is not. The scammers only use the names of these doctors, who do indeed own their practices, but who, most of the time, have never even met their “patients”. “It’s a horror, it’s a disaster. I had an industrial quantity. More people who come to the office, thinking that it was me who made the stop. They didn’t understand anything, they think it’s telemedicine,” explains one of the doctors whose identity has been usurped.
For these practitioners, the situation is particularly disabling. Some receive dozens of calls from employers, mutuals and other health insurance funds to confirm the validity of these increasingly suspicious sick leaves. “Every day, I have Social Security contacting me to ask me to confirm or deny false work stoppages”, confirms another doctor. For the time being, the authorities seem powerless in the face of this traffic, the damage to which has been estimated at 3.4 million euros in 2021.
Source: FranceInfo