While the government has announced the extension of the eligibility period for the energy check until the end of March, the crooks are having a field day. This year again, 6 million French people will receive an email announcing that they are beneficiaries of this aid. However, some of them will actually be contacted by criminals impersonating the state. These invite you to click on a fraudulent link: “to recover your check safely, please identify yourself on the site… and follow the instructions.”
And, with one click, your personal data can be put at serious risk. Phishing emails, or phishing in French, are more and more common in mailboxes. This fraudulent technique consists of trying to defraud you via an electronic message, thanks to which the thug will try at all costs to steal your bank details, your personal or professional information or your login credentials.
At first, the scammer makes every effort to pretend to be a trusted third party: a friend, the police, a supermarket, a bank, an e-commerce… To do this, he will adopt the graphic charter of the impersonated interlocutor, and will sometimes even try to reproduce his email address to invite you to reproduce an action: “cancel an order, update data, receive a gift, obtain a refund, etc.”, lists the cybermalveillance site. govt.
There, your malicious interlocutor invites you to click on a link, on which you will have to fill in information that is nevertheless strictly personal. Sometimes you will even be asked to make a payment to settle a fine or receive a gift. Don’t!
Chloé, 27 and Planet reader, is used to this kind of fraudulent emails. “I often receive them, sometimes in my spam, sometimes in my inbox. But these last few weeks, it’s worse than anything! I get them every day,” she sighs. For Planet, she tells the latest scams in vogue on her mailbox. Check them out in our slideshow below.
