The scam particularly affects professionals in the Pyrénées-Orientales.
No vacation for crooks. While scams at the electronic payment terminal (TPE) had been observed in several restaurants in Cannes during the festival, other cases were recently notified in the Pyrénées-Orientales, reports France 3.
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All it takes is one minute of inattention and you’re done. The strategy is simple: it is a question of inverting the TPE of the restaurant with identical machines but whose connected account is not that of the establishment but that of crooks. In other words, each time a customer pays his bill, the money is not routed to the restaurateur’s account: it falls directly into the pocket of the criminal.
Call for vigilance
Several days can thus pass without the restaurateur noticing the deception: “some only check their cash register once a week“, deplores to France 3 Brice Sannac, president of the Union of trades and industries of the hotel industry (Umih) of the Pyrénées-Orientales. “Once the professional notices the scam and wants to file a complaint, the account on which the money was paid is already closed and the thugs have vanished“, he continues.
Faced with this new wave of scams, the Pyrénées-Orientales gendarmerie called on restaurant owners this Saturday, July 13 to remain particularly vigilant, advising in particular in a Facebook post to personalize payment terminals with a small sticker “or any type of mark in order to allow the servers to ensure their security“. Another technique to guard against this kind of scam: systematically check the tickets issued by the TPE, in order to “make sure that the name or description of your establishment is always indicated there, proof that your TPE has not been exchanged“, already indicated two months ago, in a Facebook post, the Cannes Umih.
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