


Scalpers have been known to buy and resell hot tickets for big-name music acts or sporting events, like Taylor Swift concerts and the Super Bowl. In Florida, some were using the same tactics for a less glamorous pass: a driver’s license appointment in Miami-Dade County.
The county tax collector’s office announced on Monday that it had “uncovered a network of appointment scalpers” benefiting from access to motor vehicles offices by “hoarding free appointments and reselling them for a profit.”
“We know who they are and how they operate,” Dariel Fernandez, the Miami-Dade tax collector, said in a statement. “We will not accept any appointment obtained through system abuse.”
The scalpers found so far have not been punished, because the practice was not illegal, but there is already an effort to change that and make it a civil offense.
As for the questionable appointments, a statement from the tax collector’s office on Thursday said that it was “trying to cancel all appointments that have been flagged from a potential scalper but it is a complicated process.”
The practice has not been limited to Miami-Dade County. In 2023, the Hillsborough County tax collector’s office in Tampa, Fla., announced changes to its operations after discovering that scammers had booked appointments for driver’s licenses and then tried to resell the time slots to the public.