The supply of black market vaccine passes

I was interested to read this article from The Spinoff earlier this week:

New Zealand’s traffic light system comes into play today, and perhaps inevitably, it’s being accompanied by a new black market for stolen, shared and faked vaccine passes...

A Telegram seller who, when I last spoke to them, was selling fake vaccine record cards recently made a big pivot to buying and selling official My Vaccine Passes.

The seller, “Vax Card NZ”, told me via Telegram private message on Wednesday that they were diversifying: “Just transitioning to cover the digital passes, but we still are selling the cards.”

They went on to explain that they’re trying to build up a stock of official passes with a variety of names and birth dates. “We ideally need a variety of cards to cover the base demographics,” they said, in order to be able to offer suitable options to buyers. But so far they’ve not had much luck getting official cards, and have been raising the price they’re offering to buy the passes. “We started at $50 and are now offering $125, and will continue to raise prices until we are able to purchase enough stock,” they continued.

Clear evidence that the supply curve for vaccine passes starts from a point above the x-axis (nobody is willing to sell their vaccine pass even at a price of $50), and is expected to be upward sloping ('Vax Card NZ' will continue to raise prices until they are able to purchase enough stock'). I wonder how high the price will need to go before they have enough variety of passes to re-sell?

This bit is worrying though:

As of Wednesday, Vax Card NZ reported that they hadn’t been able to buy any cards, but they were expecting that to change. “This will likely happen when the passes start to be used as people will be able to photograph other people’s passes and then sell them,” they explained, pointing out that all they needed was an image of the official QR code in order to recreate the pass for sale.

This functionally creates a market for stolen vaccine passes, incentivising people to capture images of strangers’ vaccine passes; a process Vax Card NZ has called “mining” in their online advertisements. 

I guess that, just like your credit card, you want to be careful who is scanning your My Vaccine Pass, and what they are doing with it. To be safe, perhaps each of us should be looking at the screen of the scanner, to make sure that the person doing the scanning is using the official app, and not simply taking a photo of our QR code to resell?

The only way to effectively thwart this behaviour would be for every business that is required to scan vaccine passes, to be routinely checking every pass against a photo ID. That way, it would be more difficult to pass off a fake vaccine pass as genuine. Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be much of an incentive for businesses to have a robust process in place.

Requiring photo ID then creates problems for the small minority of people who don't have photo ID. To solve that problem, perhaps the government could subsidise people to get Kiwi Access cards? They currently cost $55 each, but they don't require a test (like a driver's licence) or citizenship (like a passport). Perhaps when a person registers with My Vaccine Pass, they could get sent a one-time voucher for a Kiwi Access card.

None of this is rocket science. We could have a vaccine pass system that works for everyone, eliminates the bulk of the black market (although those who are seriously enthusiastic about avoiding vaccination will still find a way, like getting a fake driver's licence to go with their fake vaccine pass), and doesn't meaningfully exclude sections of the population.