On a Saturday afternoon in January, Pierre (the first names in this article have been changed) received an SMS from his bank informing him that his bank transfer had been made. He then discovers that he has just been debited with 4,800 euros, transferred to an account in Germany. As he had not made any transfer, he immediately called back the adviser from his Banque Populaire branch, who told him that he had received an e-mail from him the night before asking him to carry out this transfer.
“When she forwarded this e-mail to me, I found that it had been sent with my e-mail address, that it was addressed not only to my adviser but also, in copy, to my adviser in management of patrimony, that the message contained all my tics of language and my expressions of politeness and that at the bottom of my signature appeared my telephone number. It’s a violation of something very intimate.”, he says, amazed. Attached was the bank details of the person who received the money. The transfer having been blocked in time, Pierre was recredited with the amount the following Tuesday.
This type of identity theft fraud (known as “spoofing”) has been thriving for several months. “It’s the number one fraud risk today, notes Julien Lasalle, head of the means of payment monitoring service at the Banque de France. It developed at breakneck speed during 2021.” In 2021, banks have, in fact, equipped their customers with strong authentication systems for their payments on the Internet, which are very difficult for fraudsters to attack, who then developed other techniques.
Telephone spoofing is particularly rampant: the scammer calls the victim pretending to be his customer adviser. It is all the more credible that it manages to display, on the screen of the called party’s telephone, the true number of his bank. Then he manipulates her, so that she participates in her own counting.
“They target the victim”
An experience lived by Valérie, between Christmas and the New Year. “The person I thought was an adviser to my online bank ING told me that he had noticed suspicious movements on my account, she explains. He told me that we would secure my account. He didn’t ask me directly for my password – I would have been suspicious. But he transferred me to a voice server, and there I spelled out the access codes to my banking space. » Valérie receives many text messages from her bank informing her that operations are being carried out on her account. “But, for me, they were coming from this adviser, who I was on the line with… I was in a relationship of trust. » After obtaining an increase in the overdraft limit and adding himself as the beneficiary of the transfers, the scammer emptied the account, stripping the client of several thousand euros. Valérie realized this three days later, too late to block the fraudulent transfer.
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