Several advertisers offer each point of their permits for up to 250 euros
They commit a crime of documentary falsification, with prison sentences of three to six years
In a search for Wallapop and Milanuncios, one can find what they least expected, such as an advertisement with a very brief description, “fines”, illustrated with a Spanish flag, a name, a telephone number and a phrase that provides something more information. “Pay your fines without losing points”, says the description, also concise. This seller prefers not to comment on Wallapop and asks to be spoken to on WhatsApp.
When you open your contact on this messaging platform, the first thing that appears is the same photo as on the trading platform, but the French flag has been added to the Spanish flag, a country that uses a points system similar to that of Spain, and the message traced in French. In this way, he explains that it is “a driver company in Europe” and that, in order not to lose points on the Spanish driving license, “we transmit the data of one of our drivers to to answer [en la multa] that you were not the driver at the time of the offence”.
In this way, a driver of this company “will receive the fine in his name” and gets an extra to his salary. A transfer is made with the amount “of the fine and €25 more for the one who puts it in his name”, and it is then when the driver is in charge of paying the penalty, “but they will not deduct points for having a European license and not a Spanish one.”
“It doesn’t matter the price of the fine or the number of points that they remove. It will cost you only €25 so you don’t lose points or your card“, concludes this advertiser. He has everything thought out: “For those who ask if it is possible to only pay the €25 and not the fine, the answer is NO because they are traffic fines and, if not, our drivers would be in tax debt in Spain . For parking fines, only half of the fine would be paid, since they are national and do not harm or indebted the foreign driver for parking badly.
What this businessman and seven others that EL PERIÓDICO DE ESPAÑA, from the Grupo Prensa Ibérica, have found, are offering between Milanuncios and Wallapop is provide your name and DNI so that offenders attribute the breach of traffic regulations to a person who has not committed them. The fine will continue to be paid by the driver who was photographed by the radar or who made an irregular U-turn caught by the traffic camera. To that rate, the payment to these sellers of each of the points they need will be added.
Loss of points and driver’s license
Another Wallapop advertiser asks 250 euros for each pointAlthough, if the buyer loses more than one, as if it were a market, he makes an offer. “350 the two points,” he dribbles. “What I offer are my points, since I have them all and, if a radar with points removal has caught you or you skip a stop and they deduct points, because we say that I was driving and they deduct them from me”, expresses this vendor of wild cards for reckless drivers.
Several Milanuncios vendors offer “car tires with license points”. “I have 14 tires,” says one of them. On this platform, the price of two points can amount to 450 euros. For example, the fine for exceeding the speed limit of 120 km/hour between 31 and 50 km/hour is 300 euros and two points.
The announcements are aimed at those drivers who are about to lose all their points and, therefore, of lose the validity of the driver’s license. The sanctioned pilots have, according to the General Directorate of Traffic (DGT), a period of up to 10 days to present allegations and, if it is concluded that the offender cannot drive, they will have to hand in their license at any Traffic headquarters or office.
The fined driver must meet a period of six months without driving, three months if it is a professional. Once this period is over, he will be obliged, if he wants to take the car again, to carry out and pass the road awareness and re-education course, with a duration of 24 hours. It can be done in that interval in which the offender cannot drive.
When these requirements have been met, the driver will undergo a traffic theoretical exam on the subject of the course taken and, once approved, will request a new permit, with a updated balance of eight points.
Crime of documentary falsification
The DGT points out that this practice translates into a “crime of documentary falsification”, with prison sentences of three to six years, according to article 390 of the Penal Code. In 2021, the last year calculated, the Ministry of the Interior registered a total of 14,417 clarified facts of falsehoods throughout Spain, 2,557 more than ten years ago.
From Wallapop, which prohibits the sale of driving license points on the platform, they point out that they are “in continuous contact with the police agencies and the rest of the authorities”with whom it “actively collaborates to protect users against all types of fraud and facilitate their investigation” of offenders.
To prevent the publication of this type of advertisement, they maintain, they have a team of Trust & Safety, which monitors the activity on the platform. This department, which accounts for 6% of our staff, uses different tools, including Artificial Intelligence, to analyze the activity of the profiles that upload these articles. 90% of ads for disallowed items are removed before before they become public in the Wallapop catalogue, they say.
Milanuncios, which has already eliminated the advertisements that this newspaper alerted it to, also clarifies that “the sale of card points is an illegal practice that is not allowed” on the platform. “We have several rules set up in our moderation tool to detect these types of ads before they actually run, but if they somehow manage to do so, We remove them immediately after a user report or if we find them proactively”.