[13of40]

The same sort of "scam" has helped me immensely in getting visas from countries like Russia and India, where the official process seems like it's geared toward supporting a cottage industry for third party agencies. For India in particular, doing it through the official web page required things like fitting a 100 character street address into a 40 character text box (or you get an error and it's back to square 1), trial and error to figure out what they think a valid date format is, etc. There was even a whole side quest around an alleged alcohol consumption license from Maharashtra State that featured prominently on government websites but no Indian person I knew had ever heard of.

So yeah, I think you're spot on, and this is just spending a little extra money to make the process easier, but it's just not super useful in this case.

[smsm42]

These types of companies have been very common before government agencies were on the internet. When I traveled to the US for the first time in the 90s, I had a choice - apply for visa myself, and deal with all the bureaucracy and lines and stuff (nothing was online back then), or pay additionally to the company that just takes my papers and after a while returns my passport with visa stamped and all that. I chose the latter and never regretted it. Yes, they took money for something that I could have gotten for free, but it'd cost me time and effort and annoyance. Now though, a lot of these processes are much more convenient online, so the same companies have to resort to tricks to still make the same living they used to make before.