On some Facebook or Telegram groups, a préfecture appointment sells for between 150 and 800 €. Yes, you read that right: a free public service, resold at a premium to people already worn down by months of waiting. Here's why it's illegal, what you're actually risking, and how to get a slot without spending a cent.
A very real black market, built around a free service
This isn't a fringe phenomenon. InfoMigrants documented active groups on Facebook, TikTok, and Snapchat where intermediaries running bots spot slots the moment they go live and resell them, originally for between 150 and 400 €. Read the InfoMigrants investigation. A written question raised in the French National Assembly in December 2024 went further, citing journalistic investigations that now report prices up to 800 €, along with entire websites dedicated to this resale. See question n°2937.
What makes this absurd is that the service being resold was never paid in the first place. Booking an appointment on rdv-prefecture.interieur.gouv.fr is free, for everyone, at any hour. Nobody has the right to make you pay for access to that calendar, and the official site says so explicitly to its users.
What Perfecture.fr does
Why this resale is illegal
A préfecture appointment isn't a good that can be traded. It's access to a public service, funded by taxpayers and meant to be open to everyone under the same conditions. Charging for it means diverting, for personal profit, a resource that doesn't belong to you, often relying on bots that themselves violate the official site's terms of use. Depending on the case, this can amount to fraud, or even receiving stolen goods, when the person reselling isn't the one who was originally meant to attend the appointment.
This traffic thrives on a very real shortage: the Défenseure des droits' report published in July 2026 found that residence permit renewal requests rose 43% over a few years, against only a 10% increase in préfecture staffing. See the Défenseure des droits report. It's this shortage that drives people to the edge, willing to pay, but it doesn't make the resale any more legal.
What you actually risk
- Losing your money for nothing. The transaction happens entirely outside any legal framework: if you get scammed, you have no recourse, no guarantee, no customer service to contact. Many testimonies gathered by the press describe payments sent over private messaging apps, with the promised slot never showing up.
- Handing identity documents to strangers. To book "in your name," the reseller often needs your personal information, a serious risk of fraudulent use, on a file that already touches your administrative situation.
- Seeing the appointment cancelled. If the préfecture spots the irregularity (identity, booking method), the slot can be cancelled, leaving you with your money already lost and your file still pending.
One sign that should raise a flag: no official party will ever ask you to pay for a préfecture appointment, whether by transfer, cash, or a messaging app. If an offer like that is made to you, on a group or by someone you know, treat it as a warning sign, not a good deal.
The free, legal alternative
Start with the options available when no appointment slot appears. The good news is that the legal solution costs nothing. You can monitor your préfecture's site yourself, by regularly refreshing the booking page. Or use our appointment-alert comparison to choose a monitoring tool that does that work for you, without ever touching your file or your money.
That's exactly what Perfecture.fr does: we scan available slots for your process and department, for free, and notify you the moment one opens up. Check the slots detected live on our Live map, or turn on free monitoring in a few minutes.