The craze of motorists to obtain Crit’Air vignettes, the use of which has been compulsory since Monday to drive in the capital, could well benefit certain malicious minds. The consumer association UFC Que Choisir warns against unofficial sites that sell these anti-pollution stickers at a price up to four times higher than that set by the State.
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These stickers are offered for sale for 4.18 euros on the official website Certificat-air.gouv.fr, which is the first offered during a search on Google. That is, according to the Service-Public site, 3.70 euros in fees and 0.48 cents in shipping costs.
But the prices can go up to 19.85 euros on competing sites, in particular on the German platform crit-air.fr, an unofficial but very well referenced site. The bill, four times higher than that set by the government, is justified in particular by “general technical and customer administration costs”, costs “related to the sticker”, “telephone costs” (while the the entire request is made on the internet) or “communication costs to local authorities”.
The Crit’Air site offers thumbnails almost four times more expensive than their real price (screenshot).
Crit’Air
Crit’Air is not alone in the market for this scam. Other sites offer this anti-pollution sticker at again exorbitant prices. On Vignette-critair.fr, the sticker is offered at 14.10 euros and on Cartegrise-paris.com, at 10 euros, i.e. double the official price.
“These sites, which present themselves as ‘intermediaries’, bring nothing more”, denounces UFC Que Choisir, which notes another scam linked to the purchase of vignettes: that of premium rate numbers.
If the organization denounces the fact that the official site, Certificat-air.gouv.fr, also provides buyers of vignettes with a surcharge number, it criticizes above all the fact that certain competing sites, such as Info-vignette-pollution .fr, encourage “to dial 118 818, an information service which offers to answer all questions relating to the pollution sticker and many other subjects”. Each call is charged 2.99 euros, to which must be added 2.99 euros per minute. “A small fortune when all the useful information is available free of charge on the official site”, notes UFC Que Choisir.
If so many websites have thrown themselves into the business of this sticker, it is because it concerns nearly 8 million vehicles in circulation in Île-de-France, according to a recent census by the prefect of Paris, Michel Cadot. On Sunday, the Minister of the Environment Ségolène Royal indicated in the pages of the JDD that 2.5 million requests for stickers had already been made. “Everything accelerated, especially after the pollution peak,” she said.
