In Europe, the French are considered the first affected by a scam on their bank account

Phishing, fake SMS, fake notifications, fraudulent calls… scammers don’t lack imagination to obtain their victims’ bank details. The waves of attacks today are large and numerous, almost daily, and if only a very small fraction of the targets fall for the trap, that is enough to line the pockets of the pirates.

It seems that in France the phenomenon is quite massive since according to a study carried out for the giant Visa in collaboration with Wakefield Research, 33% of French consumers admit to having been the victim of a scam on their bank account.

This is the highest rate in Europe compared to other countries such as Spain (32%), Germany (28%), UK (26%) and Italy (19%). But Indians are 52%, Americans 41%, and Chinese (like Canadians) 34%.

French easily caught

It must be said that pirates now use mental manipulation to achieve their ends. 65% of French consumers say that they respond to some of the most common traps that refer to an emergency and ask to take a required action sent by email or SMS. Messages with a positive tone and announcing good news also encourage almost one in two French people (49%) to take an action requested by a scammer.

Despite warnings from many organizations, banks, administrations and companies, 78% of French consumers do not check the correct elements to confirm the authenticity of a message.

Thus, only 56% of the French say they seek to verify that a communication is sent from a valid email address.

Scammers now master the spelling

The only point of surveillance generally enforced, spell checking by 68% of consumers, but as Visa points out, “fraudsters are paying increasing attention to these types of easily identifiable errors.”

Last year alone, Visa proactively blocked $7.2 billion in fraudulent payment attempts worldwide for 122 million transactions before customers were affected.

In 2021, according to figures from the Banque de France, the rate of securities fraud through the Map banking was 0.059%. The development of strong authentication has made it possible to reach “an all-time low” in Internet payment fraud.

But the strengthening of the security of the means of payment leads fraudsters to resort more and more to manipulation techniques to induce the victim to make or validate the payments themselves, in particular by posing as their bank adviser as Visa points out. . to study.

“The development of these techniques, which we call ‘manipulation,’ must not lead to a gray area with too long repayment terms,” ​​or even non-payment, warned the governor of the Banque de France, François Villeroy de Galhau, while the UFC -Que Choisir filed a complaint against twelve banks at the end of June for this issue.

In fact, more and more banks are accusing victims of “negligence” to justify refund denials.