Mumbai vaccination scam: How 4,000 people were conned with fake jabs

Last week, a gang of qualified doctors, paramedical staff and unemployed persons were found to have held fake vaccination camps at several places across Mumbai where they vaccinated close to 4,000 unsuspecting people with fake COVID-19 vaccine shots. The shocking report has shaken the city and the police is going all out to investigate if there's more muck than that which has been uncovered so far.

Eleven FIRs have been filed in the case so far. Leading from the forefront were three main accused, the owners of Shivam Hospital in Mumbai—Dr Shivraj Pataria and his wife Nita Pataria—and Dr Manish Tripathi, who ran the KCEP School of Medical and Paramedical Sciences near Shivam Hospital. Tripathi stored fake vaccines at his institute and used his students to give the jabs to the victims. Officials have sealed and cancelled the licence of Mumbai-based Shivam Hospital after reports of its doctors, including owner couple Dr Shivraj Pataria and his wife Nita, cheating citizens with fake COVID-19 vaccines were found to be true.

Modus operandi?

According to the reports, Nita Pataria would fill empty vaccine vials with saline water and collect money from camps while her husband Shivraj Pataria, MD and owner of the hospital, would supply the fake vaccines for the camps conducted by others in the gang across different places in the city, including posh societies such as the Hiranandani Heritage Society in Powai, schools, including the well-known Poddar School in Dadar, and offices.

Assisting the couple were a number of people from diverse backgrounds who conspired to ensure foolproof execution of the plan. A 22-year-old woman named Gudiya Yadav worked as a data entry operator at Mumbai's NESCO COVID centre and she was the one who gained the confidence of unsuspecting people in the entire operation. She did this by stealing her colleague's ID and password for the CoWIN app and managed to print authentic-looking vaccination certificates that seemed as if they came straight from the BMC.

Sanjay Gupta, an event organiser, supplied the gang with chairs, tables and other such paraphernalia required to carry out vaccination camps. Rajesh Pandey, who used to work as a sales manager at Kokilaben Ambani Hospital in Mumbai's Juhu, would divert people to Shivam Hospital for vaccination camps. This way, he would be paid Rs 200 by the Patarias for each person he diverted to Shivam Hospital.

In the latest development, it turns out that the scam had moved on from the suburbs of Mumbai to Navi Mumbai where on July 4, Turbhe police found that Manish Tripathi, one of the arrested persons, gave fake vaccines to 352 people at a private office named Atomberg Technology in Nerul, Navi Mumbai. According to reports, Tripathi had approached Kalpesh Padmakar Patil, an employee of the said company, in April. That's when he convinced Patil that he was a doctor running the KCEP Healthcare Hospital at Thakur Complex at Kandivali East, and that he could arrange for a vaccination camp at the office premises.

As per the police, at least 2,060 people were jabbed with nothing more than saline water at camps where they were charged between Rs 800 and Rs 1,260. Manish Tripathi reportedly took Rs 4,24,536 to provide Covishield vaccines to the employees at the company. The matter came to light when the employees found out that none of them had developed any signs of fever or headaches and except for two among them, nobody else had received a vaccination certificate either. And earlier, in Mumbai, the scam came to light when the residents of Kandivali's Hiranandani Heritage where the vaccination drive was conducted between May 30 and June 6, found that the certificates they were provided had different dates and no name of the hospital (Kokilaben) they actually took the shots at.

Since the scamsters had to provide certificates to those who they had jabbed, they were in a fix given that none of them was an authorised BMC official who could give authentic certificates. So in order to make fake certificates they printed names of hospitals such as Nanavati, Lifeline and NESCO, since the login was done from the systems at these hospitals. All these points nailed the culprits.

As per the police, the first in the series of fake drives could be the vaccination camp held at Bank of Baroda's Malad branch where 40 people got fake vaccinations for Rs 800 a dose and nobody had received a certificate. After that, as the gang moved on to conduct eleven more fake drives, they increased their rates to Rs 1,200 per dose.

Speaking on the entire fake vaccination scam, Suresh Kakani, additional commissioner at BMC, said that the corporation is now planning to aggressively open more government vaccination centres, so that people got easy access to vaccines and were not scammed.