Chapter 5
The Echo
Looking back, what has stayed with you? Did it change anything about you, your life, or the way you see things today?
The moral of this story is the butterfly effect: how one simple click can snowball. One click on the first result, and in the end, I paid $169 to a fake site, CAD $7 for the real eTA, $300 to get into Canada, and $140 to get out. The hotel gave my $150 deposit back, and thankfully, my company agreed to cover all of it as a business expense. These sites aren’t always illegal. Many do technically submit your application, for twenty times the price. Mine didn’t. They refunded me $144 out of $169. Sites like these are simply designed to look exactly like the government, and to sit above it in search results, where people in a hurry click. So, from someone who should have known better: Canada’s eTA lives on canada.ca, and it costs CAD $7. The US ESTA lives on esta.cbp.dhs.gov. If the URL doesn’t end in a government domain, it isn’t the government, no matter how many maple leaves it has. And never click the “Sponsored” result for anything involving your passport. And above all: don’t think you’re smarter than the people who have already been scammed. Especially with AI, scammers’ ways of defrauding and deceiving us are getting more and more sophisticated.
