The Flemish government and driving test centers are taking measures to combat exam fraud and abuse, according to the Mediahuis newspapers.

From now on, it will be mandatory to register via the Itsme app or another digital key, such as an eID, to make an appointment for a driving exam, and there will be many additional questions.

Preventing identity fraud

“By choosing to register via the Itsme digital identification app, we can be sure that the person who reserves a time slot for an exam is also the person who will actually show up for the exam”, says Steven Raes, driver’s license manager at Goca Vlaanderen, the umbrella organization for driving test and inspection centers.

The measure has been introduced primarily to prevent someone else with more knowledge of the Highway Code from taking the exam than the person who registered online.

In addition, it emerged that fraudulent intermediaries had used bots or fake names to buy up all available slots in the reservation system, only to resell them for up to €100 to candidates registering at short notice to take their driving test. Half of the driving test centers in Flanders already work entirely via Itsme.

The appointment system will also be linked to the Mercurius database, the federal database of the FPS Mobility. Only if Mercurius gives the green light – no fraud exclusion, no current driving ban, correct conditions met, such as 20 hours of driving lessons completed – can you choose a time slot?

1,700 questions

To prevent possible fraud during the theory exam, additional questions will also be added. Fraudsters often try to “crack” the questionnaires by illegally filming them and having candidates memorize the answers.

“While we used to work with around 600 to 700 questions a few years ago, we now have 1,700. We also no longer work with series. For each exam, several questions are chosen at random, and we also swap the possible answers each time,” says Raes.

16 attempts at fraud per day

Flemish Minister of Mobility Annick De Ridder (N-VA) has been urging driving test centers for some time to crack down more vigorously on all forms of fraud. She is convinced that the various measures “will substantially reduce abuse.”

Last summer, Flemish driving test centers announced that they detected an average of 16 attempts at fraud every day, ranging from identity fraud to cheating on theory questions.