The Banque de France and the ACPR (Prudential Supervisory Authority), the supervisory body for the banking sector, have established a “black list” of fraudulent sites. With more than 1200 sites listed in 2022, more than 338 new scams were spotted in the first quarter of 2023.
Investing your money is interesting but you have to be careful when choosing your establishment. “When it comes to savings, there is no urgency to invest your money. Take the time to reflect. An offer that is too attractive is very likely to be unrealistic,” explains Grégoire Vuarlot. We begin to recognize very easily, fake emails, fake calls, and fake customer testimonials. But some scammers use much more elaborate tricks. Some of them manage to impersonate real establishments. Like, for example, the online bank Revolut, Oney, Lydia, or Banque Palatine, whose names have been stolen without their knowledge.
As Élodie Toustou explains to us: the scammers “pay Google like any advertiser, to benefit from better referencing. Their site is displayed at the top of the results with the mention sponsored, alongside reputable establishments”. So be very careful of misleading advertisements that may even be at the top of the results on your search engine. Because unlike some fraudulent practices that are quite easy to spot, such as ads filled with spelling mistakes, these ads can seem quite real if you are not paying attention. This journalist says she reports “two or three fake sites a day” to Google. This is why she recommends not to “click on sponsored ads” especially when it comes to investing money.
To make sure that the establishment in which you want to place your money is real and secure, you can already check that it is not on the ACPR blacklist, directly on abe-infoservice.fr. Subsequently, he strongly advised you to see if the establishment in question is registered, either on the Orias website (association under the supervision of the Treasury), or on Regafi (register of financial agents), or else that his Siren number corresponds to the name of the company.
If you are a victim of this scam, we advise you to file a complaint as soon as possible and report it on the official portal for reporting illegal Internet content (PHAROS): www.internet-signalement.gouv. Fr. If you have noticed a fraudulent site, Grégoire Vuarlot explains that “even if you have not suffered any damage, it can be useful to prevent other attempts”. A way to protect certain Internet users who are not aware of the existence of its websites.