Be suspicious if you receive an email sent by the Notaries of France announcing that you are inheriting an inheritance. This is actually a formidable new phishing campaign!
Recently, you may have received an email from the Notaries of France informing you that you are heir to an estate. News that comes out of nowhere, but which your wallet would welcome with joy, especially in these tough times of inflation. But let’s be real, it’s too good to be true! This is in reality a very banal phishing attempt, although it is very well executed. She was spotted by the discerning eye of Julien Leroya network and cybersecurity administrator.
Notary scam: successful identity theft
The email comes from a legitimate address of a notary at Orange, which has certainly been hacked, and redirects to the real Orange file sharing site. No suspicious alerts either in the email or in the link, everything is done to inspire confidence! The message also takes care to display the logo of the Notaries of France at the top, as well as three other logos at the bottom of the page: two from the Paris 2024 Olympic Games and that of the operator Orange.
The email asks you to download an “Inheritance Rights” file in order to consult the file. It is a simple HTML page, containing no apparent malicious code. To put pressure on you, it is stated that it will expire after seven days. By opening it, a connection form asking for your username and password to access your mailbox appears. No matter what you enter, a password error message will appear, preventing you from accessing valuable information. In short, there is apparently nothing that could trigger a security alert. But in reality, your identifiers are sent to an automated bot on Telegram!
This is not the first scam that uses identity theft of French Notaries. Already in 2021, UFC-Que Choisir had alerted to a similar scam, where scammers infiltrated the email boxes of notaries and sent messages asking clients to make a transfer.
Notary scam: how to guard against it and protect yourself?
If you ever receive a message of this type from a notary, be sure to contact the firm directly, by telephone or e-mail, to ensure the legitimacy of the message. If you have ever clicked on a link of this type, check the URL that appears on the site to which you are redirected, to see if there is anything suspicious. And if, unfortunately, you have given your credentials, quickly change all the passwords of your accounts that use these credentials.
If you are ever the target of an online or SMS scam, forward the message to Signal Spam immediately, Pharosor directly to 33,700the platform specializing in reporting scams. You can also report these fraudulent messages to the site internet-signalement.gouv.fr. Then block the sender’s number or email address to no longer be bothered and delete the message in question.