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.
I'm not sure how Google can't be held responsible for this. They're literally advertising scams. They're taking money for putting up an ad for a scam site.
I don't know how there is an excuse for this that's acceptable to any authority. It's their own platform that they seem unable to control.
Take some responsibility Google, you are profiting by facilitating evil (even moreso than by regular advertising).
South Korean internet is dysfunctional enough that it's possible that Google is not showing the correct site at the top because the government site's designer helpfully decided to make the site "secure" by adding to robots.txt:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Source: Worked at Google Korea years ago. Back then, those things were common, and were commonly accepted as a solution to the problem "All your user's profiles are available in plain text, open to public, and searchable from Google!"
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
Going through VFS seems like going through one of those expensive third parties instead of direct. And each EU country has a different visa service AFAIK, so the procedure will in fact vary depending on where you are going. (not saying the experience is not horrible).
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 the UK this happens with tax rebates. For the vast majority of people your tax is calculated by HMRC and taken out of your pay and if they make a mistake you just tell them and they will adjust your tax code so you pay less/more tax until it works out.
Some shady companies set themselves up as middlemen and pocket a large proportion of the rebate when you can do it yourself in minutes through an online portal.
I've never experienced any government process where paying a third party would have simplified things. I've also never heard of any third party offerings for that purpose. Could you share some examples?
In Greece, traditionally, we tend to consider Germany as the almost ultimate place in regards to reliability, efficiency, etc. It's a bit soothing to discover that almost everywhere everybody has the same issues (the difference in magnitude matters, of course)
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.)
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.
It's not even illegal in many places. There are still a ton of legitimate lawyery/agency business outlets that do the same in physical form: They just complete forms for a hefty sum.
Sometimes they would also submit the forms / get the response back for you, which could be a real service in places where normally you would wait for a couple hours in a governmental office just to submit a form.
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.
If it was, the merchant could dispute the chargeback. It is not a one-sided process. They did not even try because I assume they knew they would lose the dispute.
I wonder if that's an American thing, every time I tried to do a chargeback here in the UK on a credit card my bank said they have to investigate first, give the seller an opportunity to respond, and only if that fails they will refund me after 60 days. While everything I see online suggests that Americans can pretty much do an at-will chargeback for any reason with instantaneous effect?
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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.
I don't know how there is an excuse for this that's acceptable to any authority. It's their own platform that they seem unable to control.
Take some responsibility Google, you are profiting by facilitating evil (even moreso than by regular advertising).
Deleted Comment
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.
Some shady companies set themselves up as middlemen and pocket a large proportion of the rebate when you can do it yourself in minutes through an online portal.
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...
At first I thought you were talking about GEZ itself.
Sometimes they would also submit the forms / get the response back for you, which could be a real service in places where normally you would wait for a couple hours in a governmental office just to submit a form.