A fake COVID card can cause real trouble for college students. It's also likely a crime.

Students who use phony COVID-19 vaccine cards to skirt mandates at U.S. colleges and universities are risking disastrous consequences, according to school officials and other experts.

Hundreds of colleges and universities now require proof of COVID-19 inoculations. The process to confirm vaccination at many schools can be as simple as uploading a picture of the vaccine card to the student’s portal. However, an easy click of the mouse could spell a hard road for students’ academic futures – if that card is a fake.

“At a minimum, it’s likely to be a federal crime … because when you get the vaccine card it has the CDC stamp on it,” Erika K. Wilson, a professor of law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told USA TODAY. “So, if people are buying those fake cards, it could certainly fall under that statute.”

Selling fake, blank cards has become a cottage industry in some corners of the internet. In at least one case, a person was arrested in California for selling fake cards.

Both faculty and students at dozens of schools interviewed by The Associated Press say they are concerned about how easy it is to get fake vaccine cards. Growing concern has even reached the federal level, with the FBI and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issuing a joint statement in March urging people not to buy, create or sell fabricated vaccine cards.

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Without a federal vaccination database, the easy-to-forge paper cards have become the default proof of vaccination. But it can be possible to determine if a card is faked.

Wilson said it wouldn’t be difficult for colleges and universities to eventually verify the legitimacy of the card: “When you get your vaccination shot, most county health departments have some record of it, so there is a way to cross-reference it,” she said.

And getting caught with a fake COVID-19 vaccine card could derail a student’s academic career.

Elizabeth Heaton, vice president of Bright Horizons College Coach, said submitting a fake vaccine card is “the absolute worst thing that a student could do.”

“Because now you’re taking something where the college wants you to get a vaccine and you don’t want to get it, and it’s a disagreement, and you’re turning it into a situation where you are lying and falsifying documents,” Heaton told USA TODAY. “And that is super serious.”

It's not yet clear how schools would handle such an infraction, but Katie Burns, a college admissions counselor from IvyWise and a former senior assistant director of admissions at MIT, said it could be seen as a violation of "community standards" — like using a fake ID. It could also be seen as an issue of "academic dishonesty" — like plagiarism. The latter often quickly leads to a student being expelled.

“Almost all colleges and universities have some internal process for meting out student discipline, and I can’t see why a violation of a policy that makes use of a fake vaccination card wouldn’t go through that same internal procedure,” Wilson said.