Queue in front of the police station of Aluche (Madrid), where foreign citizens go to do paperwork. Santi Burgos (El País)
A computer engineer who lives in Barcelona managed to put in check the computer system of the Administration and do business selling immigration appointments. The man created a sophisticated computer program that accessed the official website of the State to get the largest number of shifts available. The software was rented to dozens of intermediaries who, in turn, did business with it. After several years in which Immigration appointments have been shamelessly sold on the black market for up to 200 euros, the National Police has announced that it has dismantled a network in which 94 people allegedly participated. Of these, 69 have been arrested, including the engineer. The remaining 25 have declared to the agents as investigated.
The computer scientist created in 2021 a software program, a kind of robot, which managed to access the dating website in a repetitive and automated way. The bot managed to anticipate the moment in which each police station launched the available shifts, and blocked them in a matter of minutes. The practice, according to the police, made it impossible for any citizen to have access to appointments and forced them to pay for a free and essential procedure in the day to day of foreigners residing in Spain. In a context in which the demand for appointments is, for years, much higher than those offered by the police, the invention was a round business. The foreigners, who spent day and night in front of the screen trying unsuccessfully to get their turn, ended up buying them through the WhatsApp and Wallapop applications, in booths and through lawyers.
The computer program was able to circumvent the security measures of the website and neutralized the so-called captcha, a filterdesigned to discern precisely whether the queries are made by humans or computer robots. It also tricked the system by entering data of the interested parties automatically and changed the IP address of each device to prevent the server from blocking requests for excess requests from the same device.
More informationThe black market of appointments spreads through the Administration
The police investigations, coordinated by agents of the Central Unit of Illegal Immigration Networks and Documentary Falsehoods (UCRIF), identified that, from the system created by the engineer, a "criminal network" had been formed to which he rented the computer program. The engineer, who is around 40 years old, had created a company with which he leased his robot to dozens of interested parties. The program was offered to different managers of immigration procedures as a robot that got appointments in a "totally autonomous" way, that generates "infinite emails" and that "allows to add a filter by police stations and dates", according to the documentation to which El PAÍS has had access. Installation was straightforward, a simple Google Chrome extension. Each appointment achieved with the software was charged at 15 euros plus VAT, a price that intermediaries multiplied for their own benefit until asking, in some isolated cases, more than 1,200 euros.
The computer scientist and his accomplices recorded the commercial exchange in commercial contracts in which a license to use the robot was recognized. In addition, the collection was made through bank transfers directed to an account of the company, which the same year of its creation, in 2021, declared a net turnover of more than half a million euros, according to the accounts presented in the Mercantile Registry. The rental of the software included access to a spreadsheet where the data of foreigners interested in appointments were entered, fundamental information for the robot to formalize the request. There are detainees in 17 provinces, considered by the police as alleged perpetrators of the crimes of belonging to a criminal organization and computer damage.
In conversation with EL PAÍS, the engineer under investigation and the administrator of his company defend his innocence. "Our intention was always to create a legal system to get appointments that were no longer available to citizens. That's why we have always gone with our names and a company ahead, to make everything legal. We have never considered this to be an illegal or criminal activity, because at no time is any data or system on the web damaged," they maintain. "It is not true that we monopolized appointments, far from it," they say. Both defend the robot as "a service" that avoided thousands of people spending months in front of the computer to get an appointment. They also warn that they are not the only ones: "There are many more robots, which have a website. The difference is that they don't have a company and you don't know who's behind it."
In a first phase of the investigation, police arrested the engineer and three other people considered "main members" of the organization in February. In the actions carried out in Barcelona and Valencia, a large amount of computer effects, various documentation and a total of 206,950 euros in cash were intervened. After those arrests, according to the police press release, an economic investigation of the main investigated was carried out and the company that the engineer used to rent the bot was identified. Thanks to the intervened documentation, part of the huge group of people who either rented the program to pirate the system themselves or acted as a link in the sale of appointments was detected, including dozens of immigration lawyers who were taken statements throughout last April.
The most profitable business was in the sale of previous appointments to request asylum, a procedure with a skyrocketing demand (almost 120,000 applications only in 2022) and little supply. In fact, after learning that the system was hacked, the National Police took measures unilaterally, in parallel to the investigations and, overnight, at the end of March the shifts to request asylum, quoted at 200 euros, ceased to be available on the official website. The police improvised different systems in each province to get an appointment (by email or by phone, mainly), a formula that, according to the lawyers of Foreigners, does not work either.
Juan Ospina, defense lawyer of a score of lawyers who hired the computer program, considers that his clients are not authors of any computer crime, but, in any case, accomplices. According to Ospina, what the lawyers did was to buy the appointments to be able to provide their documentation processing services, since it was practically impossible to get an appointment through the normal channels. The police maintain, however, that the intermediaries, lawyers, managers, advisors and other contractors with whom the software provider worked "were aware and aware of the existence of computer damage against the official dating website and the corresponding damage caused to foreigners who, in many cases, were in a situation of great vulnerability and despair. "
Immigration appointments are the most precious product in clandestine resale, but they are not the only one. In fact, the sale of shifts has spread in the Administration and affects other essential services, such as Social Security or the DGT. The management of the website through which appointments are requested is not the responsibility of the National Police or the Ministry of the Interior, but corresponds to the departments of Territorial Policy and Finance, two ministries mocked by this hacker. The size of the hole that this and other people have created with their respective robots is still unknown. According to police sources, there are still previous appointments that vanish from the website at the time they are offered.
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