Comment by testdelacc1 3 days ago
Another data point - 5he Indian visa system is similar. The official website ending in .gov.in, which is hard to find, offers a visa for $10 and minimal hassle. The scam websites, with better SEO sell the same shit for $80. They’re just proxying your application to the real website and pocketing the difference.
It would be good if the Indian government could block the scammers but I guess it’s a lower priority for the moment.
No the scammers were slower than the official Indian website.
This was the case with Ghana. The Embassy in the US had an unofficial offical partnership with an expediter scam (charge more for faster shipping, looks very official). They fired the whole visa staff when it finally came to light. Probably because someone forgot to let their manager's manager in on the scam.
My understanding is that India visa processing improved quite a bit. Back when I was speaking internationally quite a bit, I actually had to cancel trips to India on two separate occasions because of delays in getting visas. (Once was under the old visa system and the other was because of delays in switching to a new system. Both times were through a visa expediting service.)
Not sure if this is the case for India, but I've experienced similar situations for other countries, but the 'scam websites' actually provided a real service - if you needed some ultra-urgent processing (like you only realized you needed a visa to this country before boarding a flight, once you were already at the airport check-in...) they were able to provide 30 minute approval, whereas the official site's accelerated processing was 24 hours.
So obviously the only way they could to this is with government contacts meaning the government themselves could already do it, but a lot of immigration stuff everywhere is full of people taking kickbacks.