Last week, ProPakistani reported that hundreds of anonymous individuals are posing as Visa Facilitation Services (VFS) Global’s agents on various social media platforms and selling visa appointments in different online groups for exorbitant profit.
VFS Global is a third-party provider of visa, passport, and consular services related to various non-European and Schengen countries such as the Netherlands. The company has 3,395 application centers and operations in 144 countries, with three of them being in Pakistan.
Although VFS Global moved the booking process of visa, passport, and consular services online following the emergence of Coronavirus, the booking slots on its website are unavailable due to unknown circumstances most of the time.
This encouraged individuals posing as VFS Global agents to siphon money from those who intend to visit abroad for various purposes such as business or seeing family and friends.
ProPakistani also sent queries to the embassies of the European Union (EU), the United Kingdom (UK), the Netherlands, and Portugal in Pakistan to elicit their official stance on the matter. So far, only the Netherlands has given a response to ProPakistani.
A spokesperson for Consular Affairs at the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Casper Soetekouw, said, “Following the easing of COVID-19 travel restrictions, there has been an increased demand for short-stay visas for the Schengen area. As a result, applicants may have to deal with long waiting times to make an appointment to apply for a visa. We control the number of applicants at the front (intake) to keep the back (processing of applications) predictable.”
The Ministry is working hard to process the increased number of applications but faces a number of personnel and technical challenges. Other Schengen countries face similar challenges. We face those challenges in different countries around the world, not specifically in one region. We are working hard in corporation with VFS to be able to process the numbers of 2019 (pre-Coronavirus) as soon as possible.
Soetekouw added, “We are aware of bad actors that try to claim and resell appointments in certain countries. We work together with VFS to limit the impact these parties have on our appointment system as much as possible. This includes but is not limited to making applications uneditable, removing suspicious appointments, and blocking access to parties that try to automate the process of making appointments.”