The Spanish government is considering implementing a new system to prevent criminal groups from selling immigration office appointments to desperate foreigners.

Spanish authorities are reviewing the possibility of introducing a new personalised passkey system in a bid to stamp out the fraudulent “trading” of appointments at extranjería (immigration) offices. 

The cita previa scam sees criminal groups use bots to book out all online appointments to then sell them on for a profit. It affects several key government bodies, such as the social security ministry, the DGT traffic authority and in particular Spain’s immigration department.

Without an online cita previa or appointment, foreigners cannot go in person to immigration offices to carry out crucial processes relating to their visas and residency in Spain. 

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In many cases, when they visit the Spanish immigration website and attempt to make a booking, there are no slots available, no matter how many times they try, as the system has been ‘hacked’.

Desperate to complete the processes affecting their residency status in Spain, many immigrants resort to paying for these free public appointments on the black market, at internet cafés, on WhatsApp and Facebook groups or through dubious businesses claiming to be law firms.

READ MORE: €90 for a ‘cita previa’ – Spain’s residency appointment scams worsen

Numerous arrests have been made but Spanish authorities have so far been unable to stamp out the cita previa scam.

Fortunately, they’re planning changes for 2026. The idea is to create a personalised key or password system, so that bad actors can’t make multiple bookings on the immigration website.

Not much else is known about how this personalised code or passkey would work in practice. 

Making an immigration appointment online in Spain already requires one of several personalised digital signatures to complete the process, but another layer of security could involve a unique code being sent to the foreigners’ phone number via SMS.

“We hope that in the first quarter of 2026 at the latest, we will have these controls in place,” Spain’s Secretary of State for Migration, Pilar Cancela, stated in an interview with news agency Europa Press. 

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“We are trying to analyse how we can strengthen controls, how we can establish procedures to detect these types of situations, and even more importantly, to prevent them from happening,” she explained.

Cancela admitted that the vulnerability foreigners in Spain face as a result of this racket is increasing.

Furthermore, a new “Report on the Reality of Migration in Spain: Priorities for Public Policies”, commissioned by the Spanish Ministry of Migration, also acknowledges the existence of an “illegal market” for administrative appointments relating to immigration procedures.

READ ALSO: How to get a ‘cita previa’ (appointment) in Spain when it seems impossible

The report states that the “difficulties” of obtaining an appointment online “have worsened due to the proliferation of practices that automatically monopolise appointments online and divert them to private networks, making them available only through certain professional services and at exorbitant prices.”

Spanish administrations implemented the cita previa system at a grand scale during the Covid-19 pandemic as a way of closely controlling how many members of the public could visit their offices at any given time, but authorities have kept this gatekeeping system in place ever since.

There has been talk and promises that the obligation of having a pre-booked appointment for official processes will soon be eliminated, most recently in Catalonia, but reforms made to Spain’s immigration laws have meant that civil servants are more overstretched than ever with applications.

READ ALSO: Spain to use AI to scrap dreaded appointment system