The UK government in March launched a website and app for people applying for an ETA visa waiver, which will be required for all travellers entering the UK with an EU, Swiss and Norwegian passport from April 2nd.
Unfortunately, the launch has been accompanied by a plague of unofficial but professional-looking sites offering to manage the process, which many applicants mistake for the official site.
The fact they appear on Google searches above the official government website it's understandable many fall prey to these sites and end up paying 7 or 8 times the real cost.
Some sites even copy the icon of a crown to imitate the government website and include the word "Official" in the title.
"We just filed for an ETA through UK ETA which cost 79 pounds. We were issued an ETA number. Have we been scammed? Gilda Camuto, a French-American dual citizen who divides her time between Italy and France, commented on The Local's website. "The logo is the crown but without the colours."
"If you don't read it carefully, you don't realise that this is actually a travel agency in Dubai," she told The Local later, saying her husband had been the first to mistake the site for a government one. "I don't understand why they [the UK government] don't tell these people not to use UK-ETA in huge letters."
The UK Home Office, which manages the official site, told The Local that it was taking action to make sure its site appeared as high as possible in search results.
"The official GOV.UK website is promoted and prioritised on search engines," it wrote. "Where GOV.UK is placed in the ordering of someone’s search results depends on their search history and behaviour."
It advised anyone applying for an ETA to use the official site.
“Applying for an Electronic Travel Authorisation (ETA) is quick, simple and cheap, especially through the UK ETA app," it wrote. “Anyone who wants information about applying for an ETA should visit the official GOV.UK website.”
READ ALSO: How to avoid being scammed when getting ETA visa waiver for the UK
The UK government declined to comment on the unofficial sites, however, or say whether it had reported any of them or tried to have them taken down.
Nor did it confirm whether the ETAs obtained via other sites are all genuine or whether travellers should apply again through the government site, as many have been asking.
What can you do if you overpay at an unofficial site?
The problem you have if you have already paid is that most, if not all, of the unofficial sites are not doing anything illegal, so long as they do, in fact, arrange an ETA for you.
"Unfortunately, it is not illegal for companies to demand a higher payment for a service than other providers that are cheaper or even free," wrote Amelie Thelander, a legal advisor for Konsument Europa, the Swedish branch of the European Consumer Centres network.
If the site is deliberately misleading and fails to inform customers that it is not an official site, if it does not provide clear information on how much consumers will be charged, or if it does not in fact deliver an ETA, this might be cause for complaint, however.
"If the consumer considers that the price has not been clearly presented, they should take contact with the company directly to complain," she wrote. "We recommend that this is always done in writing."
If that does not bring results, then you can ask your local European Consumer Centre organisation to mediate. You can find contact details here.
Can you get the site to refund you?
Most of the unofficial sites have contact forms. One site named UKETA, which is run by Dubai-based Yoyo Travels, has an automated Whatsapp chatbot, and the ETA.uk, which does not have any information on who is behind it, has a contact form and a complaints email.
The problem is that the UK government only takes a matter of minutes to approve and issue ETAs, meaning the service is likely to have been delivered before you have a chance to ask for a refund.
"If your ETA has already been processed and paid for, we do not grant or issue any refunds," a representative of the ETA-uk site told The Local, when it contacted the site asking about refund possibilities.
However, some people have been nonetheless been successful in seeking refunds.
Camuto reported that her husband was fully refunded when he contacted the agency, whereas she was not given any money back.
"He wrote to them and they reimbursed him," she told The Local. "They said, 'we're a legitimate business and we stand by what we do and our ETA is legitimate, and we will reimburse you and you get a free ETA on top of that'. "I wrote to them and they said, 'you can rest assured it is legitimate but we won't reimburse you'."
"I think I was a lot briefer than he was," she said of their different treatment, "but frankly my first thought was he's a male and I'm a female."
She is now worried, however, that she had shared so much information with a site she had believed was operated by the government.
"The thing that concerns me is you go through all these steps, you send a passport photo, you send a picture of yourself, you tell them you have dual citizenship - so this travel agency in Dubai now has photos of our passports."
Can you get your bank or credit card company to block payment?
If you have paid by credit card, you may be able to block the payment.
Mia Bernadette, who lives in Luxembourg, realised almost immediately that she had made a mistake when buying an ETA for her Swedish fiancé.
"I was thinking when I went to pay they didn’t have the cost available - it didn’t say, 'payment: 1,000 kronor'," she told The Local. "I thought it was strange that they weren't disclosing [the price] but thought it must be because it’s a government site and they think people should know."
There was no receipt when she paid either, but she got a notification from American Express telling her that 1,000 kronor (€91) had been taken from her credit card.
"I called my credit card company who told me I had to wait for the transaction to go through and then I emailed them three times saying it was fraudulent and they weren’t transparent on the cost and that their website name is confusing and that it’s criminal to charge ten times the price, so they cancelled it."
She said she felt lucky she'd been able to block the payment while it was still pending, and it's far from certain that all credit card companies would do the same.
Share your own experiences of getting an ETA below. Were you able to get your money back after getting one through an unofficial site?
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