Is This Visa Site Official? The .gov Test Fails Often

2026-10-15

The advice everyone repeats is "only use a .gov site". We can measure how often that advice fails, because we maintain a registry of official eVisa and eTA portals and use it to decide when this site shows an Apply button.

Of the 79 verified official portals we hold, 28 are not on a .gov domain — 35%. The test most people are told to use would reject more than a third of the real portals.

What our registry actually looks like

Counted in October 2026:

Official portals that would fail the .gov test include Qatar's `hayya.qa`, Albania's `e-visa.al`, Sierra Leone's `evisa.sl`, Benin's `evisa.bj` and Iraq's `evisa.iq`.

Meanwhile a reseller can register `evisa-portal-official.com` in an afternoon. The domain ending tells you almost nothing on its own.

What to check instead

1. Arrive from the government, not from a search. Open the destination's immigration ministry, interior ministry or foreign ministry site, and follow its own link to the portal. This is the single reliable method, and it is the only one that works for a country you know nothing about. Everything below is for when you cannot do that.

2. Read what the page says it is. Official portals state the issuing authority by name. Resellers describe themselves as a "service", an "application assistance provider" or an "online agency" — usually accurately, in small type, at the bottom.

3. Look at the fee presentation. A government portal charges a government fee. A reseller charges that fee plus its own, and the two are often shown as one total. If the price is presented as a single bundled number with no breakdown, you are not on the government's page.

4. Treat urgency as a warning. Countdown timers, "only 3 slots left today", and guaranteed approval are commercial pressure devices. Immigration authorities do not use them, and no one can guarantee a visa outcome.

5. Be sceptical of a portal that works for many countries. A single site offering eVisas for forty destinations is an intermediary by definition. Each country issues its own.

6. Check the page is in the destination's own voice. Official portals carry the authority's crest, contact details and legal notices, and frequently offer the destination's own language.

The grey case nobody warns you about

Not everything that is not a government domain is a scam.

Several countries contract an external provider to operate their visa processing. One portal in our own registry — Suriname's — runs on a domain belonging to a commercial visa services company, and it is the correct place to apply because that company was appointed to do it.

So the real question is not "is this a government domain?" but "did the government send me here?" An authorised contractor linked from the official site is legitimate. The same company's page, found through an advert, for a country that did not appoint it, is not.

How this site handles it

Our visa checker shows an Apply button only for destinations where we hold a verified official link. If no button appears, we do not have one — and that is deliberate. We would rather show nothing than send you to a commercial intermediary.

We have never substituted a reseller link for a missing government one, and we will not. If you find an official portal we are missing, tell us through the contact page and we will verify and add it.

If you already paid an intermediary

It is not necessarily lost. Many resellers do submit real applications — you paid more than you needed to, and your data went through a third party, but the application may be genuine. Check whether you received a reference number issued by the destination's authority, and verify it on the authority's own site.

If nothing was submitted, treat it as a card dispute and a data-exposure incident: you handed over passport details, so watch for follow-up approaches referencing your trip.

Related

• Visa checker
• Visa-free, eVisa, eTA or visa on arrival
• How to read your visa checker result
• What a visa actually costs
• Entry rule changes: what actually changed

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