The visaforkorea domains follow no single naming rule

If you are filing a Korean visa in Delhi, your website is visaforkorea-id.com. If you are filing one in Jakarta, yours is visaforkorea-in.com. That is the right way round, and it is the single most useful thing on this page, because the two letters are not a country code, or at least not reliably one.

The Ministry of Justice keeps the authoritative list at visa.go.kr under 비자신청센터. Read it as HTML rather than as a picture and it holds twenty links pointing at seventeen distinct addresses, each one carrying an image whose alt text names the place in Korean. Fourteen of the seventeen are visaforkorea addresses. Three are not: Qingdao, Wuhan and Chengdu sit on koreavisa-qd.com, koreavisa-wh.com and koreavisa-cd.com. So the first thing to know about the official list is that it is not one naming scheme. It is two, and neither one is applied consistently inside itself.

The second thing to know is that the list is short by at least eight centres, and the section below the table names them.

The seventeen addresses the ministry links

Read off the register on 17 September 2026. The centre column is the ministry’s own image label, translated. The operator column is the company each site names on its own pages, taken from the Korean-language version where one exists.

Twenty links and seventeen rows, because visaforkorea.eu is linked four times over, once each for Berlin, Paris, London and Netherlands. Eighteen of the twenty labels name a city. Two name a country instead: 몽골 for Mongolia and 네덜란드 for the Netherlands, where the register’s own body text says 울란바토르 and 헤이그. The labels are where the register gets loose about the difference between a city and a country; its prose does not.

At least four companies run the network. HanaTour has six on this list: Beijing, Guangzhou, Shanghai, Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City and Manila. VFS Global has four: Delhi with Kolkata, Chennai with Bengaluru, Abuja and Tripoli. Modetour has three: Wuhan, Chengdu and Jakarta. The Ulaanbaatar site names the International Organization for Migration. Two rows name nobody, and a fifth company, BLS International, turns up further down this page at cities the register does not list at all. Each contract was signed separately, each operator registered its own domains, and that is the whole explanation for why the table has patterns in it and no rule.

The letters are city, country, or the wrong country

BJ is Beijing, GZ is Guangzhou, SH is Shanghai, SY is Shenyang, HC is Ho Chi Minh City, CE is Chennai, MN is Manila, QD is Qingdao, WH is Wuhan, CD is Chengdu. That is ten cities, and it is why the airport-board reading gets you most of the way.

Then it stops. LY is Libya, not Tripoli. The .mn at the end of visaforkorea.mn is Mongolia’s country domain, not Ulaanbaatar. visaforkorea-sl.com introduces itself as the partner of the Korean embassy in the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka and never names a city at all. NJ for Abuja is neither: Nigeria’s code is NG, and Abuja begins with an A. VT for Hanoi is Vietnam spelled the way a Korean travel agency abbreviates it.

And three of them mean somebody else’s country outright.

visaforkorea-id.com is Delhi and Kolkata, while ID is Indonesia’s ISO code. visaforkorea-in.com is Jakarta, while IN is India’s. The two largest applicant countries on the list hold each other’s letters exactly.

The registration records show that this was sequence rather than coincidence. visaforkorea-in.com was created on 28 December 2018, with Modetour of Korea as its registrant organisation. visaforkorea-id.com was created on 3 July 2023, to an Indian registrant. Indonesia took IN first, four and a half years before India needed an address, and India took what was left. Each operator picked a readable abbreviation of its own country’s name, and the two abbreviations happened to be each other’s.

The third is tighter still. Manila is visaforkorea-mn.com. Mongolia is visaforkorea.mn. One is a hyphen inside a .com, the other is Mongolia’s own country domain, and the ministry’s image labels read 마닐라 for the first and 몽골 for the second. Typing the dot where the hyphen belongs moves you from the Philippines to Mongolia.

Neither wrong site looks wrong when you land on it. Both are real Korea visa application centres, with a real fee table, real opening hours and a real government crest. The thing that tells you it is not yours is the address at the bottom of the page, which is the last thing anybody reads. The Korean-language version is quicker: the Manila site under ?lang=ko is headed 마닐라 지역 대한민국 비자신청센터, the Jakarta site under /ko-KR is headed 자카르타 지역, and the city sits in the heading rather than three clicks down under contact.

One of the seventeen links did not open

The register’s link for Shenyang is http://visaforkorea-sy030.com, and on 17 September 2026 it timed out after twenty seconds without returning a byte. The same host over https://www.visaforkorea-sy030.com/ answered immediately with a bare IIS 403 page and no content. That is the address printed on the ministry’s own register, and it is the one a Shenyang applicant will click.

The Shenyang centre is not closed. It has a second address, visaforkorea-shenyang.com, which returns a working site titled KVACinShenyang and names (주)하나투어 as its operator. The register does not carry that address. I found it in the centre switcher on another centre’s website.

The other sixteen links all open. The Qingdao one is worth a note only because it is slow to paint: koreavisa-qd.com sends a browser to its mobile host and the page is blank for a beat before it fills in with a KVAC header, opening hours, a phone number and a notices list. It is the one site on the register that names no operating company anywhere on its front page, which is why its row above is empty rather than wrong.

The register is missing centres that are open

The centre switcher in the header of the Xi’an site lists 西安, 广州, 上海, 北京, 大连 and 沈阳, and links each one. Three of those go to addresses the register does not contain. Five more turn up outside China. Every one of these answers, serves a full centre site, and names its operator:

That is eight centres the ministry register leaves out, and six of the eight are HanaTour, the same company that runs six of the centres it does list. The Xi’an, Dalian and Shenyang sites resolve to the same server as the Beijing, Guangzhou and Shanghai sites the register carries. The Xi’an site publishes its own opening notice, 关于大韩民国签证申请中心（西安）开设的通知, dated 5 August 2025. The register’s China section names seven cities and links all seven of them; Xi’an and Dalian are not among the seven.

The Singapore, Kathmandu and Vientiane sites print street addresses you can stand in front of: 47 Scotts Rd, #17-01 Goldbell Towers in Singapore; Onesky at Pulchowk, Lalitpur, for Kathmandu; and a first-floor unit in Nongchan, Sisattanak district, for Vientiane. All three are headed in the local script, Lao, Nepali and English respectively, and all three switch to Korean.

Dhaka is the one the Korean government has confirmed in writing from the other side. On 27 August 2026 the Korean embassy there published a notice telling applicants that from 2 September, general visa applications and passport collection would run through the Korea Visa Application Center only, and it printed the centre’s website in the notice: visaforkorea-bd.com. The centre’s own site says it commenced operations on 2 September 2026. The ministry register does not list that address. One Korean government page sends applicants to a website that another Korean government page’s official list leaves out.

Treat the ministry page as correct about what it lists and incomplete about what it omits. If your city is not on it, the centre may still exist, and the thing to confirm is the mission named on the site rather than the absence from the register.

Mumbai and Hyderabad are somewhere else again

BLS International runs a South Korea visa application centre for Mumbai and Hyderabad at kor.blsinternational.com. It is not a visaforkorea address, it is not a koreavisa address, it is not on the ministry register, and it ranks well for the same searches as the VFS sites. A reader in Mumbai who trusts the register concludes their city has no centre; a reader who trusts the search result never sees the register.

That gap is worth being plain about, because the official guidance on which addresses are real is thinner than it looks. The KVAC Europe site carries a fraud warning about visa-kr.com impersonating the Korea Visa Portal, and tells readers that the only official websites are visa.go.kr and https://www.visaforkorea.eu/. The Mongolia site carries the same warning with a longer list of fakes, and tells readers that the only official websites are visa.go.kr and https://www.visaforkorea.mn/. Each sentence rules out the other centre, and both rule out the real site of an applicant in Chennai, Wuhan, Singapore or Dhaka.

Read those two lines as what they are, which is a warning about visa-kr.com, and not as a list of every official address.

If you are checking an address somebody sent you, the register at visa.go.kr is what to check it against, with the eight rows above added to it. Indonesian applicants have a longer page on the Jakarta centre, including what the fees actually come to once passport shipping is added.

One letter pair is parked, not a centre

visaforkorea-ph.com answers with HTTP 200 and a page titled Redirecting whose entire content is a script pointing at router.parklogic.com, a domain parking and traffic service. There is no visa information on it and no centre behind it. PH is the letter pair a Philippine applicant would try first, and Manila is visaforkorea-mn.com instead. A parked domain on that exact spelling is the one result on this page worth treating as a hazard rather than a curiosity.

What is not confirmed here

Two operators are not confirmed. The Shenyang link on the register served no page at all, and the Qingdao site names no company on its front page, so those two rows carry the ministry’s pairing and nothing else. The Europe row is the same case: visaforkorea.eu states that it is the KVAC Europe website and does not say which organisation runs it, so I have left that cell empty rather than carry over the International Organization for Migration from the Mongolia site, which does name itself.

For the eight centres the register omits, I have checked only one of them against a second Korean government source. Dhaka is settled that way, by the embassy notice. The other seven rest on what each site says about itself, plus the Xi’an centre’s own switcher for the three Chinese ones, and I have not found a page on a Korean government domain that names any of the seven.

The list of addresses is not proven complete, and the way I got the number is worth repeating because it is where a careless check goes wrong. I resolved all 676 two-letter combinations of visaforkorea-XX.com, and eighteen answered. Three of the eighteen, Vientiane, Kathmandu and Singapore, have no address record on the bare domain and answer only on the www host, so a sweep that asks for visaforkorea-sg.com and not www.visaforkorea-sg.com reports Singapore as having no centre. It has one, on Scotts Road. Beyond that, no two-letter sweep can find visaforkorea-sy030.com, which has digits in it, or visaforkorea-dalian.com and visaforkorea-shenyang.com, which spell the city out, and all three of those are real. The shape of the name is not fixed, so no sweep over one shape closes the question.

The operator column rests on what each site says about itself. Wuhan, Chengdu, Xi’an, Shanghai, Singapore, Kathmandu and Vientiane print the company in a footer block with a street address under it. Jakarta does not: its footer carries the local entity, PT. KOREA VISA CENTER JAKARTA, and the building, and the operator appears instead in a sentence in the body of the site, 자카르타 대한민국 비자신청센터의 운영회사는 (주)모두투어 입니다.

Fees, processing times and opening hours are not covered here. Those differ by centre and each site publishes its own. If you have filed at one of the centres the register leaves out, tell me which address you used.