New Moroccan tricks cheat Italian visa appointments and outwit information systems
Abdel Latif El-Baz – Heba Press
Among Moroccans who wish to apply for a “Schengen” visa, through the centers managed by the Italian consulates in the Kingdom of Morocco, there is no mention, except of the “fee” that must be presented to the “brokers” to obtain a date for submitting the “visa” file.
Travel communication groups are full of complaints from Moroccans about the spread of the phenomenon, as those looking for an appointment to submit a visa application through the website provided for this purpose find all the appointments booked. This forces them to resort to the services of intermediaries, in exchange for a fee that starts from 3,000 dirhams and reaches 9,000 dirhams or more, depending on supply and demand.
Data obtained by Hiba Press from Moroccan citizens who have already been subjected to what they call “blackmail” indicate that using a “broker” helps overcome all the obstacles faced by those looking for an appointment to submit their application. Indeed, brokers are able to find an appointment according to the date the client needs.
Mohamed, a young Moroccan from the suburbs of Beni Mellal, said in an interview with Hiba Press: “When you access the websites of the visa payment centers, you see that the appointments are not available, but as soon as you contact a broker, he tells you that the appointment you are looking for is available, and at any time, you will say that it is like a “mafia”.
To ensure the existence of “Schengen visa appointment brokers”, Heba Press contacted a broker who arranges appointments for his clients in one of the cities of the Kingdom, with the aim of obtaining an appointment to pay for the Italian visa application, he welcomed “cooperation when new appointments are set”.
The possibility for brokers to make appointments for the payment of the “Schengen Visa” application files for Italy raises more than one question mark. In addition to the fact that they can make appointments that seem unavailable on the websites designated for this purpose, they also make dozens of appointments via the same email. This raises the question of whether the managers of the visa centers do not pay attention to this.
Bahija, a Moroccan citizen from the town of Berrechid, spent more than three months finding an appointment to submit her visa application to Italy, along with her family members, and later described the method Moroccans are now forced to follow to obtain appointments as “humiliating.”
Visa centers place appointments on their websites, and it takes just a few minutes for the appointments to be fully booked by intermediaries who specialize in this process, who then sell them to Moroccans for amounts that vary depending on supply and demand,” Bahija explains in a statement to Hiba Press: “We feel… “It’s like we’re surrounded.”
The same spokesperson went on to say: “The way appointments are booked is insulting. You can’t just keep monitoring the site waiting for available appointments to appear, like you’re going to get into heaven with a visa, and then brokers book it and resell it.
If this Moroccan citizen was able to make an appointment on his own to submit his visa application for himself and his family members, without resorting to “intermediaries”, he is facing another problem, namely that the appointment he had made months ago was canceled, for an unclear reason, even though he paid an amount to the center that booked it, and until now he is still waiting for the refund of the amount paid, after the appointment was lost for a sudden reason.
The problem of the difficulty in making appointments at visa application centres in Morocco has prompted a number of people concerned to launch a call for a virtual campaign on social networks, in order to alert the officials of the Italian consulates in contact with these centres.
