ESTA Scams

The ESTA system (Electronic System for Travel Authorization) is a visa waiver system for people from authorised countries, to provide the U.S. customs and border protection people with the information they require before they set foot on U.S. soil. It is all done online, and it costs 14 Euros a shot. Here is the official application site. An ESTA lasts two years before it needs to be renewed. We have family in the States and visit regularly, so we make sure we always have a current ESTA.

A couple of years ago, my wife got online to renew her ESTA. She Googled for the application site and clicked on the first hit. It sported the logo of the customs and border protection service, and looked official. She filled out the details including her payment card information, and, knowing it should cost 14 Euros, clicked "pay" without paying enough attention. She was charged some 70+ Euros! The site probably just uses a 'bot to garner the details provided, pump them into the official site, and return the result.

I used Whois to find details of who runs the site and had a long, rancorous email exchange with them. Cut a long story short, we went to our bank who agreed that we had been the victims of fraud. We stopped our card to disable the fraudsters from milking our card any further, and the bank compensated us fully for our loss.

That was two years ago. But these scam artists are still there on the net. Several of them. Our young neighbours fell for one of them. I used Whois to find details of the site they used. I emailed them.

"Proud of yourselves"?

"Our young neighbours, here in France, are really excited about their first trip to the U.S. They went to an agency here to get visas. The agent said they could apply for an ESTA online. Unfortunately, the agent did not warn them of scamming, fraudulent sites like yours, you utter cunt. They don’t have a lot of money. Three of them scammed for 70 euros each. You are the scum of the earth. The internet is coming after you."

Back came,

"Message not delivered

Your message couldn't be delivered to email@authorizedcontrol.com because the remote server is misconfigured. See technical details below for more information.

The response from the remote server was:

550 5.7.1 <email@authorizedcontrol.com>: Relay access denied (G8)"

We advised our neighbours to contact their bank and try to block the payment. I'm glad to report that they were successful. They were lucky.

I can't understand how these bastards are still operating. Travel booking sites could easily include warnings on their pages, and link to the official U.S. site if someone is travelling to the U.S. And the ESTA people themselves - can't they detect multiple ESTA applications coming from the same source and block them? I shall be contacting travel sites and the ESTA people about this problem. In the meantime, please share this message to warn others about this scam.

Thanks.