A private lab in Kerala’s Valanchery has allegedly been conducting a fraud by issuing fake COVID-19 negative reports to people. Arma Laboratory has made over Rs 45 lakhs through this scam.

The laboratory is based out of Kozhikode and now Kerala Police is investigating the whole scam that has taken place. According to the police’s investigation, the lab collected approximately 2500 people’s swab samples and only 496 samples were sent to its parent laboratory in Kozhikode.

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The rest of the samples weren’t sent for a test to the parent lab and were issued false Coronavirus negative reports. This is not the only violation that’s been done by the lab, the lab wasn’t even authorized to collect samples and send them to the parent lab for testing. Also, the lab destroyed the samples for which COVID-19 negative certificates were issued.

MK Shaji, Inspector, Valanchery police station said in a statement,

"We have seized the computers from Arma lab after receiving complaints about the issue of fake COVID-19 test certificates. We found that the data from the computers was deleted. We were able to retrieve the data with the help of a cyber cell and came to know the lab collected 2,500 samples. When we checked with the Kozhikode based lab, they said the lab received only 496 samples. We also came to know that Arma lab officials issued fake COVID-19 negative certificates from untested samples.”

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Kerala is one of the worst affected states in the country and it has around 61,791 active cases in the state and also 791 casualties due to the pandemic so far. But, this scam is extremely scary and made us wonder if we can really rely on the test reports provided to us by the local labs.

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