You have been a Free customer since at least last October ? Beware of these calls which could be a well-crafted scam

Following a data leak last October at the telephone operator Free, victims are receiving calls from their “bank” asking them to transfer their money to other accounts. Be careful, this is indeed a scam.

We would all probably be fooled. Following a data leak affecting 20 million Free customers, Internet users are warning on social networks about a very well-prepared scam, according to our colleagues at 20 minutes. Scammers call you pretending to be your bank.

“LCL calls me. I have an account with them. On the other end of the line, a man, in his 40s or 50s, who speaks very well. He tells me that I have three suspicious transactions, with large amounts, that have just been made. After checking, I tell him that I don't see these payments on the application, he tells me that it's normal, because they have been detected as suspicious”, testifies Sylvain Jalbert on X. “I asked him: 'How do I know if you are really LCL ?' He gave me my bank details, my account number, my email address to 'prove' that it was really my bank, but I still told myself that it could be a data leak, or something else”, he added. The man says he was then transferred to another man who “always speaks very well, without any accent”.

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“Then he asks me how much is in my account. I tell him he should know, since he's at LCL. His response: 'It's to confirm that it's really you'.” Suspecting a scam, the Internet user decides to set a trap for his interlocutor with inaccurate information: “I said I had 11 euros in my account. He was surprised, then he asked me if I had an authorized overdraft. I had him hooked! He was just trying to see how much he could scam me. I said no, the payments were blocked at 0€. Then in the middle of a sentence he hung up”, he explained.

False transactions

The AI ​​engineer quickly made the connection and believes that all this information, as precise as it was given to him, comes from the cyber-attack that the operator Free suffered at the end of last October. Because people contacted him and told him that they had suffered the same kind of scam. They also realized that they were all Free customers in October. The criminals therefore recovered accounts with first names, last names, addresses, telephone numbers, but also some 5 million Ibans. Unfortunately, some other victims did not realize the scam and confess to having paid no less than 1,200 euros.

“To avoid being scammed, they told us to transfer our money to another account and change our bank details. And that's the real scam”. Pressure applied by web pirates by telling victims that suspicious payments for sites such as Amazon or Winamax were in progress from their account, and that this could come from… the Free data leak.