8 ms·

Calling Their Bluff

90 points by 4pkjai 1y ago

dhsysusbsjsi 1y ago
UK now charges £16 for Australians.
- avh02 1y ago
  please take a look at what they charge people who have to go through a whole visa process (for me, it starts at 179 USD to _apply_ (which may be rejected)) excluding all the time i'd have to spend and documents I'd have to collect
rgovostes 1y ago
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 (The concept seems outdated, and I've successfully rented cars abroad without an IDP at all.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?)
- lmm 1y ago
  IDPs are still very much useful and needed - short of the world agreeing on a single standard for what a driving license should look like, they're a lot more practical than expecting everyone to understand 192 different formats (and a few crazy countries like the USA even issue dozens of different license formats within the country). Delegating it to some random driving-related third party is slightly weird but not that weird (in my country they're done by the Post Office, which is arguably weirder, but I guess they also handle passport applications so it makes a certain amount of sense from that perspective).
  - YZF 1y ago
    There are many countries where just having a standard-ish license with English is perfectly fine. I think last time we had a thread on this topic someone mentioned a few countries where that wasn't true but most of Europe, the US, Canada, Australia, (edit: UK), and a bunch of other countries will just take your local plastic license as long as it has English on it.
    - portaouflop 1y ago
      There are many countries outside of the Anglosphere though…
    - ricudis 1y ago
      I have never driven a car outside of my own country, and I always wondered how they even allow you to drive a car without getting re-trained in a country where the driving system is so different than where you obtained your license (I'm looking at you, Commonwealth countries). Isn't it difficult to adapt to left-side driving while having used to right-side? It surely needs a little bit of adapting as a pedestrian.
      - cjs_ac 1y ago
        > Isn't it difficult to adapt to left-side driving while having used to right-side? You get used to it after a few minutes. It takes a bit more concentration, especially when turning out of one-way streets, but it's otherwise fine. There are mutual recognition agreements between many pairs of countries. The UK, for example, will allow you to directly exchange a licence from an EU or EEA, a British Crown Dependency, or a 'designated country' (Andorra, Australia, Barbados, British Virgin Islands, Canada, Cayman Islands, Falkland Islands, Faroe Islands, Gibraltar, Hong Kong, Japan, Moldova, Monaco, New Zealand, Republic of Korea, Republic of North Macedonia, Singapore, South Africa, Switzerland, Taiwan, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates and Zimbabwe) for a British licence with no need for a retest. Most of those countries drive on the 'wrong' side of the road.
      - spauldo 1y ago
        The hardest part of learning to drive on the left is not turning on your windshield wipers every time you turn a corner. Really though, the actual driving part is pretty easy to pick up. You get accustommed to it quickly. You're more likely to have problems crossing the street on foot (you'll look the wrong way for traffic) than driving.
postepowanieadm 1y ago
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.
- nicbou 1y ago
  In Germany there is also a strange zone where people bring sanity to government processes that have no business being this complicated.
  - ricudis 1y ago
    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)
    - pnt12 1y ago
      Nowadays that's actually Switzerland (at least I hear great things about Zurich, except the cost of living).
      - deruta 1y ago
        I've, in turn, heard much praise for how Estonia is doing it.
    - microtonal 1y ago
      efficiency Having lived in Germany for five years, this is a total myth. The German administration is a tire fire, I mean a filing cabinet fire. First lesson is: learn to wait. Have to do things at the municipality or the Finanzamt? Prepare to reserve 1-2 hours of your day, because you will have to wait a lot. And then the administration is pretty chaotic because (for historical reasons) they do not want to link administrations. Then they do random things like accidentally changing your and your partner's tax brackets in the middle of the year. My wife (who is German) chased them until they would fix it and they had no clue how it happened. Other foreign colleagues often had similar issues. The same is true by the way with non-government stuff like medical care. Have an appointment with your GP or a medical specialist? Great, the appointment only means that you have to be there at a certain time. They will let you wait an hour or two without any remorse (what's the point of an appointment)? Nothing is efficient in Germany. Reliability is also a meme at this point. Even 10 years ago, about 1/4-1/2 of the ICE trains I took would have a serious delay (which usually ended being a 2-3 hour delay if you have to cross a border). We just came back from vacation in Germany (it continues to be a beautiful country with nice people) with our electric car. The charging infrastructure is deplorable. Not only they have only a small number of chargers available (even a lot of highway stops only have two chargers), so impossible to charge on a busy day. But not only that, a lot of chargers are broken and nobody really cares for fixing them. Sorry for the rant. tl;dr: Germany is not efficient and not reliable.
ricudis 1y ago
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.
- neom 1y ago
  I hear about this repeatedly with South Korea - just googled and sure enough the first result is a sponsored scam site.
  - BLKNSLVR 1y ago
    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).
    - ricudis 1y ago
      Nowadays 90% of the "Sponsored" category that I see are scams and clickbait sites The most "innocent" of them are competitor ads trying to convert you from what you're actually searching for. Unfortunately there are no incentives for Google to fix this. Apparently they make too much money out of it.
      - BobaFloutist 1y ago
        The most most innocent just duplicate the natural correct search result.
aredox 1y ago
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.
- ricudis 1y ago
  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.
delusional 1y ago
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.
- henry2023 1y ago
  In principle yeah, it’s an abuse of charge back. In practice, Visa, MC, and Amex will just refund you without even asking any question.
  - gambiting 1y ago
    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?
    - henry2023 1y ago
      Yeah, pretty much. I used to work for an online retailer that sold high-ticket machinery parts. It wasn’t uncommon for us to face chargebacks on orders worth around $20,000. Eventually, we had to get chargeback insurance, because the only way to contest a chargeback was through a mercantile court.
- antonkochubey 1y ago
  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.
arwhatever 1y ago
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.
- nicbou 1y ago
  My industry (immigration to Germany) has many of these services. The line is easy to draw: the cost should be proportional to the convenience it creates. Basically, is it a service or an unlicensed toll booth?
a3w 1y ago
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/kaufen-reklamieren/produkte-kaufen/update-service-rundfunkbeitrag-de-befindet-sich-im-vorlaeufigen-insolvenzverfahren https://www.verbraucherzentrale-niedersachsen.de/themen/kauf...
- account42 1y ago
  > In Germany, we had a private company that offered a service no one needed to pay the household bill on public broadcasting. At first I thought you were talking about GEZ itself.
haritha-j 1y ago
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
- Aissen 1y ago
  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).
  - avh02 1y ago
    Companies like VFS are basically what the embassies have outsourced work to
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
dcminter 1y ago
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.
BlindEyeHalo 1y ago
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.
- blitzar 1y ago
  Scam sites for visas rank higher on a google search than the legit ones.

Calling Their Bluff

90 points by 4pkjai 1y ago

dhsysusbsjsi 1y ago

UK now charges £16 for Australians.

avh02 1y ago
please take a look at what they charge people who have to go through a whole visa process (for me, it starts at 179 USD to _apply_ (which may be rejected)) excluding all the time i'd have to spend and documents I'd have to collect

rgovostes 1y ago

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?)

lmm 1y ago
IDPs are still very much useful and needed - short of the world agreeing on a single standard for what a driving license should look like, they're a lot more practical than expecting everyone to understand 192 different formats (and a few crazy countries like the USA even issue dozens of different license formats within the country). Delegating it to some random driving-related third party is slightly weird but not that weird (in my country they're done by the Post Office, which is arguably weirder, but I guess they also handle passport applications so it makes a certain amount of sense from that perspective).
- YZF 1y ago
  There are many countries where just having a standard-ish license with English is perfectly fine. I think last time we had a thread on this topic someone mentioned a few countries where that wasn't true but most of Europe, the US, Canada, Australia, (edit: UK), and a bunch of other countries will just take your local plastic license as long as it has English on it.
  - portaouflop 1y ago
    There are many countries outside of the Anglosphere though…
  - ricudis 1y ago
    I have never driven a car outside of my own country, and I always wondered how they even allow you to drive a car without getting re-trained in a country where the driving system is so different than where you obtained your license (I'm looking at you, Commonwealth countries). Isn't it difficult to adapt to left-side driving while having used to right-side? It surely needs a little bit of adapting as a pedestrian.
    - cjs_ac 1y ago
      > Isn't it difficult to adapt to left-side driving while having used to right-side? You get used to it after a few minutes. It takes a bit more concentration, especially when turning out of one-way streets, but it's otherwise fine. There are mutual recognition agreements between many pairs of countries. The UK, for example, will allow you to directly exchange a licence from an EU or EEA, a British Crown Dependency, or a 'designated country' (Andorra, Australia, Barbados, British Virgin Islands, Canada, Cayman Islands, Falkland Islands, Faroe Islands, Gibraltar, Hong Kong, Japan, Moldova, Monaco, New Zealand, Republic of Korea, Republic of North Macedonia, Singapore, South Africa, Switzerland, Taiwan, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates and Zimbabwe) for a British licence with no need for a retest. Most of those countries drive on the 'wrong' side of the road.
    - spauldo 1y ago
      The hardest part of learning to drive on the left is not turning on your windshield wipers every time you turn a corner. Really though, the actual driving part is pretty easy to pick up. You get accustommed to it quickly. You're more likely to have problems crossing the street on foot (you'll look the wrong way for traffic) than driving.

postepowanieadm 1y ago

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.

nicbou 1y ago
In Germany there is also a strange zone where people bring sanity to government processes that have no business being this complicated.
- ricudis 1y ago
  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)
  - pnt12 1y ago
    Nowadays that's actually Switzerland (at least I hear great things about Zurich, except the cost of living).
    - deruta 1y ago
      I've, in turn, heard much praise for how Estonia is doing it.
  - microtonal 1y ago
    efficiency Having lived in Germany for five years, this is a total myth. The German administration is a tire fire, I mean a filing cabinet fire. First lesson is: learn to wait. Have to do things at the municipality or the Finanzamt? Prepare to reserve 1-2 hours of your day, because you will have to wait a lot. And then the administration is pretty chaotic because (for historical reasons) they do not want to link administrations. Then they do random things like accidentally changing your and your partner's tax brackets in the middle of the year. My wife (who is German) chased them until they would fix it and they had no clue how it happened. Other foreign colleagues often had similar issues. The same is true by the way with non-government stuff like medical care. Have an appointment with your GP or a medical specialist? Great, the appointment only means that you have to be there at a certain time. They will let you wait an hour or two without any remorse (what's the point of an appointment)? Nothing is efficient in Germany. Reliability is also a meme at this point. Even 10 years ago, about 1/4-1/2 of the ICE trains I took would have a serious delay (which usually ended being a 2-3 hour delay if you have to cross a border). We just came back from vacation in Germany (it continues to be a beautiful country with nice people) with our electric car. The charging infrastructure is deplorable. Not only they have only a small number of chargers available (even a lot of highway stops only have two chargers), so impossible to charge on a busy day. But not only that, a lot of chargers are broken and nobody really cares for fixing them. Sorry for the rant. tl;dr: Germany is not efficient and not reliable.

ricudis 1y ago

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.

neom 1y ago
I hear about this repeatedly with South Korea - just googled and sure enough the first result is a sponsored scam site.
- BLKNSLVR 1y ago
  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).
  - ricudis 1y ago
    Nowadays 90% of the "Sponsored" category that I see are scams and clickbait sites The most "innocent" of them are competitor ads trying to convert you from what you're actually searching for. Unfortunately there are no incentives for Google to fix this. Apparently they make too much money out of it.
    - BobaFloutist 1y ago
      The most most innocent just duplicate the natural correct search result.

aredox 1y ago

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.

ricudis 1y ago
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.

delusional 1y ago

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.

henry2023 1y ago
In principle yeah, it’s an abuse of charge back. In practice, Visa, MC, and Amex will just refund you without even asking any question.
- gambiting 1y ago
  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?
  - henry2023 1y ago
    Yeah, pretty much. I used to work for an online retailer that sold high-ticket machinery parts. It wasn’t uncommon for us to face chargebacks on orders worth around $20,000. Eventually, we had to get chargeback insurance, because the only way to contest a chargeback was through a mercantile court.
antonkochubey 1y ago
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.

arwhatever 1y ago

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.

nicbou 1y ago
My industry (immigration to Germany) has many of these services. The line is easy to draw: the cost should be proportional to the convenience it creates. Basically, is it a service or an unlicensed toll booth?

a3w 1y ago

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/kaufen-reklamieren/produkte-kaufen/update-service-rundfunkbeitrag-de-befindet-sich-im-vorlaeufigen-insolvenzverfahren https://www.verbraucherzentrale-niedersachsen.de/themen/kauf...

account42 1y ago
> In Germany, we had a private company that offered a service no one needed to pay the household bill on public broadcasting. At first I thought you were talking about GEZ itself.

haritha-j 1y ago

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

Aissen 1y ago
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).
- avh02 1y ago
  Companies like VFS are basically what the embassies have outsourced work to
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

dcminter 1y ago

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.

BlindEyeHalo 1y ago

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.

blitzar 1y ago
Scam sites for visas rank higher on a google search than the legit ones.