FOSSOYEURS – With the health crisis, the police are observing an upsurge in email scams. Summons larger than life about “child pornography” or “pedophilia” are sent to victims in order to extract money from them.
LCI editorial staff | Video report A. Basar, B. Guenais and F. Le Goic –
It is said to be the most common scam on the Internet. Just a month ago, while he was consulting his emails, Geoffroy Delpit discovered a summons to the minors’ brigade announcing that he was initiating legal proceedings against him for “child pornography”, “pedophilia” or even “cyberpornography” .
“It’s getting cold. It’s scary. Me, deep down, it was sure, there was no problem, but my wife, when I told her about it, the first thing she said to me was that ‘is ‘do you have something to reproach yourself with?’“, jokes the recipient of this email.
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Geoffroy Delpit therefore does not react to the reception of this email. A few days later, he receives a new notification. This time, the email asks to pay a fine of 8,578 euros, in order to suspend the proceedings. “So there, I immediately understood that it was a scam”, he reacts.
However, it was larger than life. The summons in the mail even included the signature of a gendarme in office, General Marc Beauget. Geoffroy Delpit manages to contact him. This then confirms to him that it is indeed a fraud. “It looks like a real mail. But you can imagine that if it was indeed true, not only the gendarmes would not send you this by email, but would come and explain it to you early in the morning one day. case, in any way, we could extract money like that from people “, specifies the general in the subject of the 20H of TF1 at the top of this article.
“We are going to play on human reflexes like fear”
The hackers behind this scam choose to use a particular bias. Indeed, according to a cybercriminal who chose to remain anonymous, these web hackers are not only computer experts. They also show a little psychology. That’s what we call “social engineering”.
“We start from the principle that the human being is easier to compromise than a computer or a system and suddenly, we will play on human reflexes such as fear”, underlines the cybercriminal questioned by our teams, adding that the health context has also contributed to an increase in this type of scams.
“We have to tell ourselves that there is an obvious upsurge since the Covid and the confinement. Because people are on video purchases a lot, are on their computers a lot. On scams like this, there are people who have already made more than a hundred thousand euros “, he assures.
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This juicy business claims more than 20,000 victims each year in France. But to date, only about thirty have lodged a complaint. However, this is what should be done, according to the instructions of the Ministry of the Interior, when faced with this type of scam.
It is also recommended not to panic, not to respond and above all, not to pay. Once filed on the cybermalveillance.gouv.fr. Site, the complaint will be handled by some of the more than 7,000 investigators mobilized to find the cybercriminals. They risk up to two years in prison and a 100,000 euros fine.
