AIMA Issues a Fresh Scam Alert on Appointment Fraud — Why Foreign Residents Should Memorise the Five Official Channels

The Agência para a Integração, Migrações e Asilo (AIMA) used 1 May to publish another fraud alert through its Instagram and Facebook channels — the fifth such warning since August 2025 — telling foreign residents that the agency's appointment-scheduling process is free, is run only by Portuguese state entities, and is never done by phone through the AIMA Contact Centre. The alert was carried by Público's Brazil desk the same day.

The pattern is by now familiar enough that AIMA's own communications team is essentially repeating itself: a fake site goes up, mimics AIMA's visual identity, charges between €30 and €60 for an "agendamento" that the real AIMA never charges for, takes payment in card data and personal data, and then either disappears or gets pulled offline once AIMA's legal team triggers the takedown. The site comes back a few weeks later under a different name. SEFAIMA. aimapt.com. aima-pt.org. The script is unchanged.

What AIMA actually said

The 1 May post is short. Quoted in the Público report, the agency said that "the request for scheduling for in-person service is free and carried out exclusively by Portuguese state entities, by the applicant themselves or by a legally authorised representative." The follow-on line is the one that matters: "appointments are not made by telephone through the Contact Center. Use only official channels to avoid misinformation, improper intermediation or abusive practices."

That second sentence rules out two of the most common scam vectors at the same time. It rules out the cold-call "we can get you an appointment" pitch — typically routed through WhatsApp groups in Brazilian, Indian and Bangladeshi communities — and it rules out the third-party "despachante" services that have proliferated in Lisbon, Setúbal and Faro since the SEF wind-down, charging €100 to €400 to do something the applicant can do for free.

The five official channels — these are the only ones

AIMA listed the legitimate channels in the same post:

• contactenos.aima.gov.pt — the contact form for general queries, status checks and document uploads
• [email protected] — the agency's general email address; appointments are not booked by email but enquiries are accepted here
• servicos.aima.gov.pt — the main service portal where most online procedures (renewals, document submission, status tracking) happen
• portal-renovacoes.aima.gov.pt — the dedicated portal for residence-permit renewals, which is the highest-volume use case
• services.aima.gov.pt — the English-facing services portal, used by some categories of applicant

Anything that does not end in aima.gov.pt (or, for legacy SEF-era links, sef.pt) is not an AIMA domain. Anything that asks for credit-card payment to schedule an appointment is not AIMA. Anything that arrives by SMS, WhatsApp or Telegram is not AIMA.

Why this keeps happening

The scam economy around AIMA exists because the underlying queue is enormous. The Ordem dos Advogados has put the number of pending immigration cases against AIMA in Portuguese courts at roughly 200,000. AIMA itself confirmed in late April that it had processed 90,000 residence-permit renewals since the agency took over the function from SEF in September 2024. The Government's own April update through the Via Verde foreign-worker visa scheme that we covered earlier this week showed 6,080 visa requests from 32 nationalities — a flow that funnels back into the AIMA queue once those workers arrive.

Foreign residents waiting six, nine, twelve months for an appointment are a reliable mark for any operator who can credibly say "I can get you in next week." The fact that AIMA has had to issue five fraud alerts in nine months — August 2025, September 2025, March 2026, April 2026, and now 1 May 2026 — is a measure of the volume of money these schemes are pulling out of the immigrant population.

If you have already been targeted

AIMA's standard guidance is that suspected fraud should be reported to one of four entities, in this priority order:

• Polícia Judiciária (PJ) — the lead investigator on cyber-fraud cases
• Ministério Público (MP) — the prosecution service, which can be reached via any PJ or PSP unit
• Polícia de Segurança Pública (PSP) — for in-person reports in urban areas
• Guarda Nacional Republicana (GNR) — for in-person reports outside the main cities

If you paid by card, contact your bank within 24 hours and request a chargeback under the EU's Payment Services Directive. If you transferred personal data — passport scans, SNS user number, fiscal number — assume those data have been resold and that you will see secondary scam attempts (fake "Finanças" tax-refund emails, fake bank-verification SMS) in the weeks ahead.

What this means for expats

• Bookmark the five real domains. contactenos.aima.gov.pt, [email protected], servicos.aima.gov.pt, portal-renovacoes.aima.gov.pt, services.aima.gov.pt. Type them in. Do not click links from emails, WhatsApp or Telegram.
• AIMA never charges for an appointment. The agendamento itself is free. Fees only exist at the in-person stage and they are paid into the Portuguese Treasury, not by Stripe or PayPal to a private operator.
• AIMA never books by phone through the Contact Centre. If a caller offers to schedule for you, they are either a despachante charging an unlawful fee or an outright scammer. There is no third option.
• A legitimate representative must be a lawyer or a registered solicitador. The Ordem dos Advogados has a public lookup at oa.pt; the Câmara dos Solicitadores has the equivalent. If your "representative" is on neither list, they are not legally authorised to act for you.
• If your appointment is delayed, do not panic-pay. Article 15 of the Manifestação de Interesse regime guarantees lawful presence in Portugal while AIMA processes a complete file. The legal framework protects you in the queue. The scam operators are selling you something the law already gives you for free.

The Government has confirmed that AIMA's scheduling pipeline will not clear before late 2026 in the most-affected categories. That is the structural condition that keeps the scam economy alive. Until the queue actually clears, the only durable defence is to memorise the five real domains, ignore everything else, and report fraud through the PJ when it happens. AIMA can keep posting alerts; it is the foreign-resident community that has to stop paying the operators on the other side.