The Indexia group will be judged at the end of May and the beginning of June in Paris for deceptive commercial practices, after over-invoicing of insurance for telephones and computers, a judicial source said on Monday, confirming information from France Bleu Drme Ardche.
The trial will take place on May 27, 28, 29 and June 4 and 5, 2024, this source said. The leader of the Indexia group (now renamed Hubside) and seven legal persons will be tried for misleading commercial practices and obstructing an audit.
Through the intermediary of several companies, such as SFAM, the Indexia group marketed, among other things, services to provide telephones and computers. After receiving hundreds of reports from customers, fraud repression launched an investigation.
533 victims recorded
This investigation revealed practices consisting in misleading consumers wishing to stop direct debits, cancel their subscriptions and be reimbursed the sums debited after termination of their contract that their requests were taken into account, or even effective, according to the general management of the competition, consumption and the repression of fraud (DGCCRF).
The conclusions of the investigations were transmitted to the Paris prosecutor’s office, which summoned the defendants to appear in court. For this trial, 533 victims are registered, said the judicial source.
We are confident about the outcome of the current procedures. The alleged practices Hubside (the new name of the Ed group) are largely unfounded, the group said on Monday in a statement sent to AFP.
The Indexia group has turned the page on insurance to devote itself to the distribution of new and refurbished multimedia products and the design of new services since the spring of 2023, according to the same source.
In April, the French insurance police (ACPR) issued a precautionary measure against the company SFAM, temporarily banning the distribution of any insurance contract. At the beginning of the same month, the group suspended the signing of new insurance contracts.
Civil procedure
In mid-March, dozens of consumers took civil action against three companies belonging to the Indexia group. The procedure continues.
The scope of this criminal trial seems relatively restricted to me, responded Me Emma Leoty, who is leading this civil action. It would concern the period March 2014-July 2020 for consumers who had canceled their contract and who were debited despite everything. I will constitute my clients as civil parties, she added.
A first administrative investigation targeted SFAM for the same suspicions in 2018: the company agreed in 2019 to pay a fine of 10 million euros. This fine did not, however, put an end to customer alerts for overbilling.
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