US visa waiver scam

I got scammed online. I guess it was just a matter of time, but I’d thought that I was smart enough to avoid such things. It’s a pretty slick scam, here’s how it works:

To visit the US from many countries one must now apply online to something called ESTA in order to obtain a so called “visa waiver”. We’ve been doing this for many years on the plane, recently it’s gone online and now you must to do it online before your travel. Knowing this, I googled for US visa waiver and up came a site for applying for US ESTA visa waivers online. I went through the usual process and at the end had to pay a processing fee. A few hours later I went to the site to see if I had been processed. Then I noticed a typo in the word “New Zewland”, weird. Then I saw a grammatical mistake in their faq, a simple mistake, but a mistake nonetheless. Really strange. Oh oh… was this registration site for real?

So I went back to Google and searched again. The EIGHTH link that google returns when searching for “US visa waiver” is in fact the real US government site that you want. The service is free and I was approved in a few seconds. There is even a warning about the scam sites there: of course if you’re reading their warning you must already be on the right site! Anyway, there is now some shady group with money from me, all my credit card details and even my passport details. Bugger. At least I realised my mistake and made a real application and was accepted. It would have been much worse if it had caused me to miss gaining entry permission to the US and messed up my travels.

What’s really clever about this scam is that it might actually be legal. I can imagine that it’s possible to pay somebody to apply for a visa waiver for you, and this is the “service” these companies are providing. Of course, nobody who knew what they were doing would do that given that you have to provide the same information online in both cases, and one costs you money and you don’t know for sure if they will actually make the application for you. Indeed, in my case I suspect they will not as there were a few things on the real application form that they didn’t ask for. With tens of thousands of people going through this process each day I guess that these sites are making piles of money.

I think this is pretty morally dubious from Google’s perspective: they are taking money to put up a bunch of sponsored links that direct people to scam sites ahead of the real government site. I emailed Google saying that they were accepting money to promote scams, if they reply I’ll post it in the comments below.

UPDATE: The money did go out of my account, but then a few days later a reverse payment was made. I’m not really sure why. So at least it appears that I haven’t lost any money. Nevertheless, these are pretty shady characters and I’d rather not have given them all my details. As for Google, to date their response to my complaint has been silence. They are still taking money to promote links on their search engine that direct people to scam sites… that’s pretty evil by my books, and seemingly all the people I’ve since talked to agree.