An email whose sender presents itself as “Ameli Customer Service” asks you for personal information to replace your “obsolete” Vitale card at the end of 2023. Distrust…
This is one of those messages that you can find in your mailbox this summer and which will surely raise a pang of anxiety, before plunging you into a more or less severe form of perplexity. Since the beginning of July, an email sent by “Ameli Customer Service” indicates that your Vitale card will be “obsolete” at the end of the year and invites you to renew it. Many people have already received this email in recent weeks which has all the features of an official document.
The message indeed displays the Health Insurance logo at the very top, under the subject “Ameli.fr” and it bears the title “ORDER YOUR NEW CARD” (in capital letters). A short text indicates that “the old cards will be made obsolete at the end of 2023” and that “it is therefore important to make the change as soon as we receive this email”.
“Please follow the procedure for obtaining your new card by following the link below”, is it written immediately, with a button “Access my account”. Below, some statistics are highlighted, allegedly taken from a “BVA barometer”.
The capture of the message received by email
When you click, you will be asked for personal information, including a login and a password. But on closer inspection, this email looks like a scam and is nothing more than a huge fraud. A look at the sender (“[email protected]”) will quickly make the most seasoned understand that the message does not come from Health Insurance. This fraudulent email had already been reported on the ameli forum last summer.
A typical scam: the Vitale card has no validity period
As recalled by the Health Insurance, as well as the site Service-public.fr, the vital card never expires, it is issued without a validity period. If the dematerialized vital card was launched this year in several departments, it does not change the validity of your card. Updates are nevertheless recommended each year to indicate your changes in situation (marriage, birth, long illness, moving, etc.). But in any case, it is advisable to follow your steps directly on the Ameli.fr website.
On his site, Ameli.fr indeed indicates that “Assurance Maladie never asks for the communication of personal elements (medical information, social security number or bank details) by e-mail outside the secure space of the ameli account” and that “all messages of this type outside the ameli account space are attempts at “phishing”, phishing in French”.
L’Assurance Maladie advises, as a last resort, to verify the sender of the email received. When the Assurance Maladie sends an email to an insured person, the sender that appears is “Votre Assurance Maladie” and only one of these email addresses is valid: assurance- [email protected], ne-pas-repondre @app.assurance-malady.fr or [email protected].