你的跨國簽證，如何成為一門暴利生意？

此報導由總部位於荷蘭的調查新聞組織 Lighthouse Reports 發起，團隊成員包括端傳媒、Politico歐盟部、法國《世界報》（Le Monde）、德國《明鏡》（Der Spiegel）、《印度快報》（Indian Express）等全球15家媒體。

This report was initiated by Lighthouse Reports, an investigative journalism organization headquartered in the Netherlands. The team includes members from Initium Media, Politico Europe, France’s Le Monde, Germany’s Der Spiegel, The Indian Express, and fifteen media outlets around the world.

在經歷一年調查後，團隊取得取得16個國家在2025年兩個季度辦理前往瑞典的辦簽資料；並採訪 24 名 VFS 現任和前任員工。我們嘗試拼湊出全球最大簽證商—— VFS Global 如何利用全球流動不平等，透過高壓銷售和簽證政策於申請人身上榨利，最終養成一頭無法約束的跨國巨獸。

After a year-long investigation, the team obtained visa-application data for travel to Sweden from two quarters of 2025 across sixteen countries, and interviewed twenty-four current and former VFS employees. We have tried to piece together how VFS Global, the world’s largest visa-services company, exploits the inequalities of global mobility, extracting profit from applicants through high-pressure sales tactics and visa policy itself, and ultimately growing into an unrestrained transnational beast.

On April 9, 2026, at VFS’s UK Visa Application Centre in Beijing, a Xiaohongshu user arrived twenty minutes later than her scheduled appointment. VFS staff on site told her that she had missed her chance for the day and would have to make a new appointment to submit her documents two weeks later. But if she chose the VIP lounge service, priced at 700 to 900 yuan, she could still submit her application that same day.

2026年4月9日，在北京的 VFS 英國簽證中心，一位小紅書網友比預約登記時間晚到了20分鐘。現場的 VFS 工作人員告訴她，她已經錯過了今天的機會，必須重新預約兩周後遞交材料，但如果選擇價值人民幣700—900元的貴賓休息室服務，那今天依然可以遞簽。

She felt this was deeply unfair: if being late meant having to pay to make the problem go away, then those who arrived on time yet still had to queue for a long while should also be compensated by VFS. Why were they not? She tried to file a complaint with UK Visas and Immigration (UKVI), but was told to contact VFS. Furious, she decided to abandon her trip to Britain. In a post on Xiaohongshu, she listed a series of grievances, accusing VFS of an unseemly appetite for money and of seeing nothing but profit. She wrote that over the years she had watched VFS’s service deteriorate steadily, while UKVI, by outsourcing its work to VFS, was “bringing shame on Britain.”

她覺得很不公平：遲到就得「破財消災」，可那些按時趕到的人也要排隊等待很久，爲什麽 VFS 就不向他們賠錢呢？她試圖向英國簽證與移民局（UKVI）投訴，對方讓她聯繫 VFS。憤怒的她決定放棄這次英國行程。她在小紅書上發文，羅列了一系列問題，控訴 VFS「吃相難看」、「滿眼都是錢」，並稱自己這些年見證了 VFS 的服務水平每況愈下，而把業務外包給 VFS 的 UKVI 則是在「丟英國的臉」。

Type “VFS” into Reddit, and waiting, anxiety, and uncertainty are themes users cannot escape. One user applying for a UK student visa said VFS did not answer emails, had no phone line, and even displayed spelling errors on its website, to the point that he briefly wondered whether it was really an official service. A Schengen visa applicant preparing to travel to Italy for a conference wrote: “There are no appointment slots for any Schengen country, not one,” while the VFS website itself was “a nightmare.” Many users complained that VFS employees take advantage of informational opacity to steer them into buying unnecessary services. One user summed up the company’s pitch for VIP service as “very aggressive”: staff would tell applicants that ordinary waiting would take two and a half hours, while buying VIP would take only ten minutes, but he found that without VIP the wait was only fifteen minutes.

在 Reddit 上輸入「VFS」，等待、焦慮和不確定是網民離不開的主題。一名申請英國學生簽證的網民表示，VFS 不回郵件，沒有電話，網站上還有拼寫錯誤，以至於他一度以爲這不是官方服務。一名準備赴意大利參加會議的申根簽證申請者則寫道：「任何申根國家都沒有預約時段，一個都沒有」，而 VFS 網站本身就是「一場噩夢」。許多網民抱怨 VFS 的員工利用信息不透明，誘導他們購買非必要服務。一名網民總結說，VFS 對 VIP 服務的推銷「非常強硬」：工作人員會告訴申請人，普通等候要兩個半小時，購買 VIP 只需十分鐘，但他發現不買 VIP 也只需等十五分鐘。