Yes, and it is a procedure rather than a judgement call: verify the domain, verify the route that brought you to it, verify the fee against the government’s published figure, and verify who is asking to be paid. Run those four before you enter a passport number, and one more after you have paid. A convincing design costs a fraudster almost nothing to copy, so appearance is the one thing on the page you should not treat as evidence.
1. Verify the domain
Official portals sit on government domains. In most countries that means a country-code address with a government segment inside it: .gov.uk, .gouv.fr, .gov.au, .govt.nz, .gov.in. The United States uses .gov directly, so the American travel authorisation lives at esta.cbp.dhs.gov.
Read the address from the right. The part that identifies the owner is the label immediately before the top-level domain, and everything to the left of it was chosen by whoever registered the name. A page at india-evisa.gov.in.application-portal.com is not on an Indian government domain. It is on application-portal.com, dressed up. Hyphens doing the work of dots is the most common version of this trick. Appended words are the second: official, online, apply, centre, authority, bolted onto a real country name.
The padlock plays no part in this check. It certifies that the connection is encrypted, which stops other people reading what you send, and says nothing about who receives it. Certificates are free and issued in minutes, so fraudulent sites carry them as a matter of course. Treat https as a floor: its absence disqualifies a site, its presence tells you nothing.
2. Verify how you arrived
The address bar only helps if you know how you got there. Most people reach a visa portal by searching the destination and the word visa, then clicking near the top. Those top positions are sold. An advertiser bids on the search term, writes the headline, and nobody checks whether the site behind it belongs to the government. Search engines label these results Sponsored, and that label is the entire extent of the vetting.
Navigate instead from a page you can place independently: the destination’s immigration department, its foreign ministry, or its embassy in your country. All three publish the application link. Once you have the portal open, bookmark it and use the bookmark every time you go back. Status checks are where people get diverted, because a status check means searching again.
3. Verify the fee before you look at the price
Do this in the order given. Find the official consular fee first, on the government portal or the embassy page, and note the number and the currency. Then look at what the site in front of you is charging. Checking in that sequence means you are comparing against a figure you already hold, instead of assessing whether a price seems reasonable, which with no reference point to hand it always does.
Three outcomes follow:
- The total matches the consular fee. You are on the government portal.
- The total is higher and itemised: the consular fee on one line, a service fee on another. That is a commercial service being straight about what it takes.
- The total is higher with nothing itemised. The site has answered the question for you. Something is being charged that it would rather not name.
Our requirements checker gives you the consular fee and the document list for a given passport and route, so you can hold the reference figure before you open anything else.
4. Verify who is asking to be paid
A commercial service that intends to exist next year says who it is. Look for three things, and look for them before you pay:
- A company identity. A registered name, a company number where the jurisdiction issues them, and terms and conditions naming the same entity. “Our team” is not an identity.
- An address and a way to reach a person. A postal address that resolves to a building, plus an email address or phone line that is answered. A contact form on its own tells you nothing.
- Two fees, stated separately. The government’s charge and the company’s charge, each with its own figure, visible before you enter passport details.
The payment page deserves one more look. The merchant name on the card form, and later on your statement, should relate to the site you are buying from. A descriptor belonging to an unrelated business suggests the money is routed through an account that will not be there when you want to dispute it.
Anonymity combined with urgency is the signature of the other kind of operation: a site that will not say who it is, and wants a decision inside ten minutes, is telling you what it is.
5. Verify what you receive after paying
A genuine portal issues something checkable. Expect an application or reference number in the format the government publishes, and expect to be able to type it into the portal’s own status page and see your case. That last part is the test: the number has to work on the government’s site, not only in the email that delivered it.
Approval exists as a record in the government system. Airlines query that record at check-in, which is why a confirmation living only in a PDF attachment proves nothing on its own. Open the portal from your bookmark, enter the reference, and read the status there.
A payment that fails, or a confirmation that never arrives, is not automatic evidence of fraud; cards get declined for reasons that have nothing to do with the site. Our guide on what to do when an eVisa payment fails covers the ordinary causes and how to separate them from the other kind.
Where commercial services fit
Applying through a company instead of the government portal is a legitimate choice, and a common one. People pay for it because the official form asks questions in language they are unsure of, and because having someone check the photograph and the dates before submission is worth money to them. Nothing about that arrangement is fraudulent.
The offence is impersonation and concealment: presenting yourself as the government, or charging a fee you decline to name. A service that identifies itself, quotes the consular fee at the government’s figure, and shows its own fee as a separate line has done nothing wrong, whatever it decides to charge. The price is then yours to judge.
By that test: SimpleVisa charges a $39 service fee, shows it beside the consular fee before the form starts, and passes the consular fee through at the amount the government charges.
If a site fails a check
Close the tab and start again from the government’s page. If you have already paid, or already uploaded a passport scan, the recovery steps are in our guide to the five common electronic visa scams, which also sets out the patterns these checks are built to catch. Four checks before payment take a few minutes. A card dispute takes considerably longer.