Unable to renew passports, many Israelis resort to paying scalpers for appointments
With backlog of a million pending renewals following pandemic, some pay hundreds of dollars as system is overwhelmed by hackers
For more than a year, Israelis have been finding it almost impossible to renew their passports due to a severe shortage of appointments, with various networks of hackers and bots capturing thousands of appointments in the government’s online system and selling them for prices that can reach hundreds of dollars.
Many despairing citizens who want to go abroad are being forced to pay up to $250 per appointment to individuals selling them on the Telegram messaging app. Other bot networks promise applicants to quickly find a free slot for a reduced price of NIS 130 ($35).
“I feel terrible, I’m frustrated and disappointed,” a woman told Army Radio on Thursday, saying she has been trying to reserve appointments for her family since November, to no avail. “I feel like I’ve simply been imprisoned here in the country.”
Another option is to pay a higher fee of NIS 430 ($117) for a temporary passport — valid for two years — which doesn’t require an appointment. The regular fee is up to NIS 280 ($76). A third option available for those with tickets to fly immediately exists at Ben Gurion Airport, where an office provides emergency passports for NIS 845 ($230).
The Interior Ministry’s Population Immigration and Border Authority (PIBA) has repeatedly promised an imminent solution to the problem and has said it would add more appointments and manpower, but all its efforts have proven fruitless thus far.
The issue has its roots in the COVID-19 pandemic, during which international travel was severely curtailed and lockdowns limited both the government’s ability to issue new passports and the public’s will to make such appointments.
This created a backlog of an estimated one million passports that need renewal, quickly leading to all available appointments being swamped last year when pandemic restrictions were removed.
The problem is exacerbated by the fact that many applicants must show up in person to be issued their first biometric passport, which includes taking their fingerprints.
The phenomenon of appointments being sold online — allegedly by Russian hackers — recently came to the fore after Din Moriel, known for his English tutoring videos on TikTok, made public the existence of a Telegram account offering thousands of pre-booked appointments.
“When I contacted the admin asking to schedule two appointments, he said it would cost me $500,” Moriel said in a video posted online last week.
One man interviewed by Channel 13 news on Thursday said he could not find an appointment until 2030. In many cases, the system — on the MyVisit website and app — simply says there are no available appointments at any date at any of the dozens of PIBA offices around the country.
Moriel told the network that the “current system is very vulnerable to hacking.”
“You don’t need to be a skilled technician to enter it and book all the appointments,” he added.
PIBA said in a statement on Thursday that it had recently managed to free up 5,000 appointments that were reserved by bot networks.
PIBA director Eyal Siso told Kan news on Thursday that the appointments system is best checked on Sundays, when there should be available slots for the coming days or months. He asserted that the selling of appointments online “is not that big,” and urged the public not to pay for the service.
“We have 600 employees that are taking care of this. In the coming days, we will come out with an organized plan that includes a small addition of employees and technological changes,” Siso said.
According to Oren Ariav, PIBA’s chief digital and information officer, the problem isn’t with the MyVisit system, but rather with the huge number of people waiting for appointments and the inability to accommodate this demand.
Speaking Friday with Army Radio, Ariav said the planned technological changes include switching to a new online interface being developed by PIBA.
However, Siso admitted in an interview Thursday with Globes that realistically, he expected a true solution to only be put in place toward the end of 2023, with the implementation of technological advancements that will enable far quicker production of new passports.
The Times of Israel Community.