The General Directorate of the Police of Spain launched a pilot project on Thursday that automatically assigns appointments for fingerprinting to foreigners who receive a favorable residency decision, thereby eliminating the need to manually search for an appointment in an overloaded system that had created a lucrative black market.
The announcement, included in an official statement from the Illustrious Bar Association of Barcelona, indicates that the measure will start in the provinces with the highest volume of procedures: Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Alicante, Málaga, and Murcia. The system had already been tested previously in Girona, Tarragona, Lleida, and other provinces across the national territory.
Guillermo Morales Catá, general director of Legalteam —a consultancy specializing in foreign affairs and immigration based in Barcelona— celebrated the news in a video posted on Facebook that garnered over 11,000 views in just a few hours.
"It’s over the days when you had to pay a call center or a mafia for appointment scheduling at the police," stated Morales Catá at the beginning of his speech, before explaining how the new mechanism works.
Under the new system, foreign nationals who receive a favorable resolution will receive an email and an SMS with the details of the appointment that has been assigned to them. If no appointment has been received 20 days after the notification of the resolution, the interested party must request it through the usual web portal.
The pilot project initially affects 10% of the cases resolved from this date onwards. The authorities will decide whether to implement it fully after analyzing the initial results.
The official statement emphasizes that the process is fully automated and that the Documentation Units of the Police do not have access to the system nor can they address incidents, which must be channeled through the User Assistance Center of the appointment website.
The measure comes in direct response to a black market that had turned a necessity for thousands of people into a business. Although the appointment for fingerprinting is relatively inexpensive, the scarcity of available slots has inflated prices in the black market to between 80 and 400 euros per appointment in Barcelona, with extreme cases reaching up to 3,000 euros according to previous judicial investigations.
The National Police dismantled in November 2024 an organization that technically blocked the appointment server of the Administration using bots to monopolize slots and resell them. In August of this year, another arrest took place for selling appointments at around 70 euros each.
Morales Catá clarified a key point: the automatic system applies to stay or residence procedures managed by the provincial Foreigners' Offices, but not to those who processed their permit under the extraordinary regularization. Those applications are handled by the UTEX (Unit for Processing Foreigners' Applications), based in Vigo, and are excluded from the pilot for now.
"If you want to do things right, if there is the will, problems can be solved," he concluded. "What will happen now to those people who profited from your money by selling you an appointment that was completely free?"
Filed under: