Appointment reselling racket blocks ID card renewals in Barcelona

Appointment reselling leaves Barcelona without ID cards

Renewing the national ID card (DNI) in Barcelona has turned into an obstacle course. The public appointment system shows no slots available while, in parallel, according to the account that opens this discussion, a black market is thriving that resells those same slots for between 15 and 20 euros. The story is blunt: there is no option anywhere in the province, and anyone who needs one ends up turning to middlemen or to buy-and-sell groups where appointments are traded like concert tickets.

The paradox is no small one. This is a free, mandatory and personal procedure —the document carries a name, surname and number— yet it has become a bottleneck with a waiting list and, according to those who suffer it, a resale price. The initial complaint soon gave way to a broader diagnosis: bureaucracy as a business, the appointment system as a toll and the state as an unwitting supplier of scarcity.

What is wrong with the ID card appointment system

The first point of disagreement lies in the mechanism itself. Some argue that booking already requires entering the details of the ID card to be renewed, so reselling would be technically impossible; against that weighs the argument that, if a slot could be reserved without personal details, the flaw would lie in the system's design rather than in those who exploit it. The discussion gets tangled up over whether the fault lies with the website, the Ministry of the Interior or the police station itself.

A calculation circulating in the thread points to the technical root of the problem: ID card numbers are finite —eight digits and a check letter derived through a simple operation— so a computer program could generate valid combinations in seconds and launch bots to grab appointments every day. It is not proof, it is a hypothesis, but it fits the feeling that slots vanish before an ordinary citizen can click on them.

Empty police station, website with no slots

The scene repeats itself: a deserted waiting room, officers at their posts and a sign pointing to the online appointment system. Anyone asking to be seen without one gets the same answer. The contradiction between installed capacity and digital availability is what generates the most irritation, and it fuels the suspicion that the system is not sized for real demand.

Add to that the timing. Some have managed to book for 10 November after trying at one in the morning, which suggests that slots are released at odd hours and snapped up within minutes. The experience fits the bot theory: narrow windows, uneven competition and a human user who is late by definition.

From ID cards to fishing licences: the appointment as a toll

The frustration does not stop at the identity document. The conversation jumps to other procedures —the fishing licence that demands unnecessary certificates, the expired permanent password (Clave) whose renewal requires an electronic ID card that has also expired, the car certificate with its roadworthiness test— and draws a pattern: self-imposed requirements that protect against nothing and push citizens to pay a third party to untangle the maze for them.

The harshest reading of the situation is that the scarcity is generated by the administration itself, through negligence or incompetence, and that the middlemen simply take advantage of the murky waters. There are no official figures in the discussion, only the observation that a free procedure has acquired a market price. On that basis, the analysis stalls exactly where the institutional response should begin: no one has yet explained why the system allows bookings without tying the appointment to a specific person.