Visa appointment fraud has proved a growing problem for many governments and their external service providers in recent years. Fraudulent actors claim to be able to book appointments as soon as they come online, encouraging applicants to share sensitive personal data with them. They sell appointments that should be available online free of charge, exploiting visa applicants to make a profit, and often making false promises to encourage applicants to pay exorbitant fees. At TLScontact, we are rolling out a new automatic appointment allocation solution for France in Morocco, to combat this fraudulent activity and ensure more equitable access for legitimate visa customers.
International travel has officially returned to pre-Covid levels, bringing with it an influx of travellers seeking to explore foreign destinations. As demand for visas – and visa appointments – continues to rise, so too do the risks associated with appointment fraud. This is a growing issue for a number of our government clients, and one that we have been working hard to address for several years, as set out in our article Visa outsourcing: tackling appointment fraud.
Multiple measures to secure our online booking systems
Over the past few years, we have implemented a wide range of measures to secure our online booking systems, working with security experts and our in-house cyber security team. These include mechanisms such as advanced CAPTCHA solutions to block online bots, round-the-clock monitoring of web traffic to be able to blacklist any suspicious email accounts and domains very rapidly, and OTP (One Time Password) solutions to reduce the creation of fake accounts. Unfortunately, in view of the increasing demand for visas, the incentives remain for intermediaries to try to “game” the system, using any available methods. The activities of these middlemen deny ordinary visa applicants equitable access to appointment booking systems and undermine trust in the whole visa application process.
A new solution: automatic appointment allocation
At TLScontact, we recently started testing a new solution at our French visa application centres in Morocco, allocating appointments automatically to applicants who have registered on our website, instead of opening our appointment tables for online booking. The aim is to offer genuine visa customers a fair, equitable way of obtaining an appointment, filtering out fraudulent intermediaries who try to book and sell appointments for a profit.
How does the process work?
Applicants who want to secure an appointment must first create an account on the TLScontact website. An appointment will then be automatically allocated to them, subject to available slots, on a random basis, and they will receive an email with the date and time of their appointment. Their booking is confirmed as soon as they have made payment of the TLScontact service fee. Otherwise, the slot is released back into the system and can be allocated to another applicant.
It is important to note that this process does not guarantee an appointment, and if the applicant hasn’t been contacted within 60 days, they will need to repeat the process. However, it does mean that for the visa categories covered by this new system, intermediaries no longer have any possibility to sell appointment booking services to applicants, as slots are allocated automatically by our systems instead.
Encouraging results from our pilot in Rabat
We ran a pilot programme at our centre in Rabat in the autumn of 2024, with encouraging results. Over the first four weeks of the pilot, our cyber security team noted a very significant drop in the bot activity that was detected and blocked by our systems. Bot detection was down 12% by the end of week 1 compared to the situation before the pilot, and down 48% by the end of week 4. This demonstrates a dramatic reduction in the activity of fraudulent actors seeking to monitor appointment tables. These positive trends have continued in the period since. In parallel, nearly 12,000 applicants have obtained appointments at our Rabat centre through the new system since the launch of the pilot.
We are now rolling out this process to other centres in Morocco, starting with our French visa application centre in Casablanca, where we launched the new process in mid-March 2025. We are also discussing potential implementation with other government clients who are facing similar challenges.
The future of visa appointment management
Based on the success of our initiative in Morocco, it would increasingly appear that automatic appointment allocation offers the most effective way of combatting appointment fraud. It is not necessarily required across the board, for all locations and all visa types. However, when the imbalance between supply and demand for appointments for particular visa types creates tensions in the system, it can guarantee a more equitable allocation of appointments to genuine visa applicants and remove the incentives for fraudulent actors who wish to exploit them.
The benefits for both applicants and governments are clear: less frustration for applicants, less criticism and reputational blowback for government visa departments, and more faith in a visa application process that is fair and secure for all.
Article written by Morgan Caujolle,
Director of Cross Operations