Beltelecom blocks access to Polish Consulate's website

Beltelecom is involved in frauds on the special website of the Polish MFA for online visa application for Belarusians.

User of Hrodna website s13.ru Balodik carried out his own investigation.

The mechanism is easy – Belarusian internet monopoly Beltelecom blocks access to the registration site at the moment of allocation of appointments at the consulate, so that only clients of certain travel firms can register online at the price of from 150 to 500 euros.

Problems with the access to the Polish consulate's website appeared long ago, so many Belarusians went abroad to fill in online application forms. Trying to solve the problem of frauds, the Polish authorities permitted access to the website of the consulate only from the territory of Belarus since May 18, 2013.

To check where the access is blocked one needs to run tcptraceroute from the command line at the moment of registration. User Balodik did so and figured out that packets are blocked by the router BelPAK (a subdivision of Beltlecom) at the moment of accepting applications and filling in application forms. The website becomes available 30 minutes after all appointments have been booked.

“We may suggest that connections to port 443 78.133.160.148 are blocked up to the gateway asbr2.net.belpak.by. Taking into account that all internet service providers meet this behaviour, we may suggest that blocking is performed by Beltelecom's gateway,” the internet user concludes.

Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper recently wrote about problems with online registration on the Polish consulate's website.

“The problem with visas for Belarusians will not disappear until we are able to send more consuls to Belarus. But the Belarusian authorities don't give their consent,” Polish MFA spokesman Marcin Bosiacki said to the newspaper.