Welcome back to the podcast, Bride, Swindle, or Steel. I'm Alexandra Rogge. Today we're talking

about a form of financial crime which may seem petty because of the small amounts involved

in each transaction, but as with other forms of financial crime, however trivial they may seem,

they aren't victimless. We're talking about the brisk black market in fake COVID-19 vaccination forms.

My guest is Haley Smith. Haley is a staff writer with the Los Angeles Times covering trending

and breaking news. She's also had her work published in Vogue,

Huffington Post, and elsewhere. Haley, thank you so much for joining me. Yeah, thanks so much

for having me. Regardless of anyone's position on the vaccine, I think we can agree that fraud is

bad. If someone works in a setting with immunocompromised people, for example, believing that person is vaccinated when they aren't

carries risk. It's dishonest and it's illegal. You covered this story for the Los Angeles Times.

Can you just walk us through what happened in California? My job is to cover breaking news, which oftentimes are things like arrests and car accidents

and fires, et cetera.

But every now and then, a story will come across my desk that seems to have larger implications,

and this was one of those stories.

The setting of this is a tiny town in San Joaquin County,

California. The town is called Clements. It's about an hour south of Sacramento. I think the

population is fewer than a thousand people. So not the kind of place that might typically make

national news. So here in Clements, we have 59-year-old

Todd Anderson, and he's the owner of this bar called Old Corner Saloon. And so what happened was I saw

a sheriff's department news release that Mr. Anderson had been arrested and charged with selling

fake COVID-19 vaccine cards.

So if you've been vaccinated or if you know someone who has, you probably know what I'm talking about.

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