Il faut toujours faire attention aux informations bancaires que l’on communique. MIDI LIBRE – PHILIPPE MALRIC
Retrouvez, tous les mois, la chronique de l’UFC Que Choisir de Sète qui peut permettre d’éviter de mauvaises surprises.
Where we talk again about the fake bank advisor scam in the Sète area. We remember the case of this lady who, last September, lost her savings in this context and had to sleep in her car with her disabled son before a good soul took them in.
A new victim in January
In total, during the year, the UFC Que Choisir Sète Bassin de Thau branch handled around twenty fraud cases for a total loss of more than €108,000. And unfortunately, at the beginning of 2025, another victim was added to the list. Indeed, a resident of a retirement home was contacted by a person pretending to be an agent from her bank's fraud department. She told her that suspicious transactions had been detected on her account and asked her to log in to her online bank to reject these transactions.
200% Deposit Bonus up to €3,000 180% First Deposit Bonus up to $20,000€2,400 withdrawn
It was a Friday. It was then 6:30 p.m. The retiree's bank branch is closed until Monday. The contact, very professional, speaks like a real technician. He presses her. Tells her that there is an urgent need to act to counter a fraud that promises to be very serious. The retiree, frightened, therefore logs on, and follows the instructions given step by step. In fact, she does not reject the transactions as she believes, but she validates purchases by credit card. The next day, she realizes that she has been the victim of a scam. She asks the bank branch to reimburse her for the €2,400 that was stolen from her. The agency refused on the grounds that it had validated these transactions itself.
She was lucky
The resident of the retirement home then contacted the local UFC association, which wrote to the bank's Complaints department. The arguments were heard (abuse of weakness, extortion by trickery of the validation of banking transactions) since the sum was quickly reimbursed to her. “She was lucky because cases of this type are not always settled so well or so quickly”, they comment at the UFC. And to deplore that it is still too often requested by people who have had dealings with the false bank advisor. The sums involved can be very large. Banks are very reluctant to reimburse and often claim gross negligence.
Some precautions to take
In any case “be aware that your bank can call you to ask if you are the originator of a particular transaction, but it will never ask you to provide your identifiers and codes, nor to intervene in your online banking application to carry out manipulations related to these transactions, or to click on a link that will be sent to you by text message and which will take you to a fake site”, remind the leaders of the consumer association. The rule is simple: if a bank advisor calls you to tell you that your account has been hacked, hang up immediately and contact the fraud department yourself, accessible 24/7, with the number provided by the bank.
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