Is there any legal recourse against these people selling appointments at Ausländerbehörde?

you can actually skip the whole legal route and go straight to the "termin stornieren" trick instead. the ausländerbehörde releases a batch of cancelled slots every morning around 7:30, but the trick is to use the "termin buchen" page on a desktop browser with autofill, not your phone. i snagged one last month after three days of that, and it's a known workaround in the expat facebook groups. for the sellers tho, most of them operate from the same few telegram channels, so if you screenshot the group link and the seller's handle, you can forward it to the "hinweisgeber" email on the berlin.de site, it's specifically for appointment abuse. they actually responded to me within two weeks with a case number, even though nothing happened after that. also, check if the seller is using a real name, i found one who also had a registered "einzelunternehmen" in the handelsregister, and a simple zivilrechtliche unterlassungsklage from a lawyer costs them more than they'd ever make, but that's a last resort. otherwise, just keep refreshing and set an alarm for the 7:30 drop, it's less stress than fighting bots.

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There's actually a specific paragraph in the Berliner Landesverwaltungsgesetz that covers this, section 5a about "unlautere Terminvermittlung," and the Senatsverwaltung für Inneres has a dedicated task force for it. I found out about it through a friend who works in the Verwaltung, and they told me the key is to send evidence directly to the task force's mailbox, which is listed under the "Dienstaufsicht" section of the inneres portal, not the general Ausländerbehörde contact. They've actually shut down a few Telegram channels that way, but it only works if you include the full chat log with timestamps and the seller's payment details, like their PayPal or bank transfer reference. One more thing that's often overlooked: the sellers sometimes reuse the same booking code across multiple listings, so if you spot that, it's a clear sign of systematic hoarding, and that's exactly what the task force is looking for.

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fwiw the legal angle is kinda dead unless you can prove actual damages, which you can't if you never paid. but there's a sneaky move: check if the telegram sellers are also posting on ebay kleinanzeigen under "dienstleistungen". that platform has a proper report flow and the gewerbeamt actually monitors it. i got one listing taken down in like 3 days with a simple screenshot. also, the ausländerbehörde has a "hinweisgeber" form on their site specifically for appointment misuse, most people don't find it cause it's buried under "service" -> "kontakt". that one goes straight to their interne kontrolle, not the public queue. couple that with a dienstaufsichtsbeschwerde and you're basically double-tapping the same office from two angles. won't kill the bots but it makes the sellers burn through accounts faster than they can make money.

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Worth noting that Berlin street names have official umlaut and ß rules that trip people up, so a sign showing "Strasse" versus "Straße" is not actually a spelling error, just an older transcription. Same with "ue" versus "ü" (e.g. "Kantstrasse" vs "Kantstraße"), both are considered valid renderings and you'll see the ß version on the blue Schilder and the ss version on older plaques or in databases that predate Unicode. If the difference you're seeing is between those two forms, there's nothing to fix and both are technically correct.

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if the signs u mean are the old enamel ones on the house facades those are often protected as Baudenkmal so nobody's allowed to correct them even if the spelling is outdated. the binding version is whatever is in the Berliner Strassenverzeichnis plus the entry in the Liegenschaftskataster, so if u tell me the street i can point u to the right Bezirksamt Mitte or Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf page. tbh the merged district thing is real but the facade signs are a separate story, theyre basically museum pieces at this point

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honestly thats super common in Charlottenburg, the district offices were merged from older Bezirke and nobody ever fixed all the Schilder. if its a real street you can check the official strassenverzeichnis on berlin.de, that list is what the Burgeramt actually goes by. which street is it? some of the Kaiserdamm / Kantstrasse signs are notorious for this.

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