Do not fall into the panel. Almost all administrative procedures are free in France, the sites that offer you to pay to make them steal your data and subscribe to overpriced services.
In France, the vast majority, not to say the whole, of administrative procedures are free. Whether it is a request for passport, driving license or identity card, registration on the electoral lists, the issuance of a gray card or a Crit’Air sticker, Or the obtaining of a birth certificate or an extract from the criminal record, none is paid.
However, many unscrupulous sites offer paid services to carry out these same steps. This practice, although not illegal in itself, is supervised by law. However, almost all of these commercial sites violate the rules, even contain real scams, as shown by an investigation of the repression of fraud (DGCCRF) carried out in 2023.
First of all, these sites often “usurped” the identity of public administrations. To deceive citizens, they appropriate elements of the visual identity of the State (logos, colors, typographies) and use domain names close to those of official sites/ in this way, they create and maintain confusion In the minds of users, who are then less suspicious.
Then, most of these sites proceed to disguised sale. To garner income, they hide a registration for an overpriced subscription behind a first inexpensive service (a few euros). The user, often in a hurry and little attentive, then finds himself engaged without his knowledge in an expensive contract, and only discovers the deception once the sums taken from his account.
Finally, these sites can collect and resell the personal data provided by users within the framework of the administrative approach. This information, which can be very sensitive (social security number, postal address, etc.), can then fall into the hands of even less recommendable actors, and serve to carry out scam campaigns.
The use of paid sites to carry out administrative procedures is therefore not only useless, since these procedures are free, but also dangerous. In general, it is strongly recommended to always go through the official administration sites, which end with “.gouv.fr”, or by the service-public.fr portal, to carry out procedures.