Calling Their Bluff (opens in new tab)

It's an excessively common scam nowadays that everybody is requiring an eVisa or electronic travel notice.

Fun story:

Once I was traveling to a country X that I was familiar enough with to know that thir governmental services web sites were awfully designed. We're talking about web design that would easily put Geocities to shame.

They had recently introduced an eVisa scheme that I have to complete.

Out of tirednes and being in a rush, I clicked at the wrong link. It gets me into a shiny, modern web page with nice graphics and a form to complete.

I instinctively think "WAIT! This is TOO nice for an official site!".

Then I look at the address bar, see an obvious scam-SEO URL, realize my mistake, and go back to search for the real one.

Which was as terribly designed as expected.

You think this is bad? Try getting visa for Europe within the UK as a citizen of a 3rd world country. The official process is through a service such as VFS, which is the most painful experience I've had with any sort of service. There are very few appointments, all of which are blocked out by 3rd party bots, which means you need to pay a 3rd party twice as much to get any appointment. The VFS website is riddled with bot deterrents that actuall just deter humans, such as entering your password through a non-qwerty, randomised, on screen keyboard. If you call their helpline, you get charged for it. Everything is an upsell. You fill in a pdf form, print it out, give it to them and then they look at the printed document and type it back into their computer. There are literaly queues of people standing on the street outside their offices because they offer no seating, like the queues outside a club. Oh and you have to submit biometrics every single time, and therefore go in person for these apponitments that are impossible to get. I once had to submit my biometrics thrice in the same year for italian visa

Setting aside the scam aspect, I find it depressing that places that used to be visa free for residents of certain countries have now instituted visa-but-not-a-visa with a fee across the board.

Visiting the US from the UK I used to have to fill in the green "Visa waiver" form, but it was free, short, and blanks were handed out on the flight in. Now I must file an ESTA ahead of time and pay a fee. Visitors to the EU and UK (and even between the EU and UK) will have similar advance paperwork.

It feels like a huge step backwards with very dubious advantages compared to the unwelcoming "fuck you pay me" feel of the encounter. There's nothing I like more when choosing a holiday destination than filling in a multi page bureaucrat-designed form and paying a fee for the pleasure.

A minor blip in the greater scheme of things, but it saddens me.

There's a strange (for someone from Eastern Europe) zone around public services where shady individual thrive: like buying vignettes - you may buy "directly" from the state (nemzetiutdij.hu, eznamka.sk, edalnice.cz) or by some middleman that brings nothing to the process but has a ~20% commission.

In Germany, we had a private company that offered a service no one needed to pay the household bill on public broadcasting.

If their SEO ranking beats the official site, they could confuse the hell out of people. (And I am told people do not use uBlock or Pihole everywhere, so paid ads would work, too.)

They seem to leave the market, perhaps due to being sued they cannot make a profit: https://www.verbraucherzentrale-niedersachsen.de/themen/kauf...

Do people not use their own government as the entry point for visa applications? I just go to the website of the foreign office of my government which has a list of the requirements to enter every country in the world and what needs to be done and how. I have never started with a google search.

This scam is everywhere: set up a website to "middleman" yourself into the application process of any online permit/certificate/authorization, make it look as similar to an official website as possible, game up your way to first place in search results through SEO, profit.

Isn't this abuse of the chargeback system? I was under the impression that chargebacks were for resolving otherwise unresolvable conflicts between the buyer and seller. Here the buyer didn't even attempt to get a refund from the seller before the chargeback.

I wonder how much of a bright line can be drawn to distinguish these sites that charge to “help” you through some governmental process vs like TurboTax.

I wonder how many people have paid for International Drivers Permits from scam websites. In the US these are only issued by AAA, and until recently they were only available by mail or in person, creating an opening for grifters to sell print-at-home PDFs.

(The concept seems outdated, and I've successfully rented cars abroad without an IDP at all. Also, isn't it weird that authority to issue these is delegated to AAA, and them only?)

UK now charges £16 for Australians.