“Urgent: you will lose your CPF rights. Claim your training 100% supported. “ Millions of French people have received, in recent months, this SMS or one of its variants, when it is not calls from operators claiming to be official agencies, which push employees to urgently choose training. Otherwise, they wrongly assert, of losing their accumulated rights.
Behind these solicitations, most often made from listings of coordinates purchased in bulk, hide scams, aimed at getting their hands on the war chest that constitutes the personal training account (CPF). Since 2015, this system has replaced the individual right to training (DIF), often unknown to the general public. Simpler, more accessible, the CPF offers anyone over 16 years of age with a professional activity a revolving credit – directly recorded in euros since 2019 – to subscribe to training in a few clicks from the official My Training Account platform.
The spirit of the project was virtuous, regrets Michel Clézio, president of the National Union of Training Organizations (Synofdes): “The law wanted to give more initiative to individuals, outside of their status”, by allowing each employee to choose his training independently of his company. But the state may have, according to him, “Wanted to go a little fast” and did not measure the“Windfall effect” created by this new device for unscrupulous actors. An entire sector was born from this new CPF, with the most dubious practices.
“16 million euros of fraud”
The scam can be outright theft, with the hacking of an employee’s CPF account to siphon off their credit. Scammers collect the necessary information, like the Social Security number, then point out bogus training, and cash in on the profits. Franck (the people who testify did not wish to give their names), who works in IT, thus discovered by logging in at the beginning of 2021 to his account “That two courses in English had already been debited (…), an e-mail address containing [son] name and surname was used but it is not at all the [s]ienne. I have never done these trainings. ” The crooks were able to create a new account in his name to siphon off his training credits, paid to a pretext company.
The Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations (CDC), responsible for administering the CPF system, mentions “14,300 accounts concerned and 16 million euros of fraud”. A figure to be put in perspective with the “3.4 million training courses” provided since 2019. The institution lodged a complaint against 35 companies listed as training organizations and likely to engage in this type of scam. But for Michel Clézio, these figures could only be the part that emerged from an iceberg of fraud: “People do not go to their CPF account like they would in a bank account, the damage will be discovered gradually. “
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