Have you recently received an email from your energy supplier? Be careful, this may be the new scam circulating and which has already claimed several victims in France.
Scammers usually don’t just target one service, but several. A new scam another scale has been put in place and concerns your electricity supplier. The one currently targeted in the Rhône region is the supplier ENGIE. The Rhône gendarmerie group shared an alert message on Facebook this summer. The scam in question is circulating by email.
An email asking you to regularize your situation
The people behind this recent scam have created a fake email pretending to be ENGIE. We will first explain to you that despite multiple reminders, “payment of your ENGIE Home Services invoice of 403.21 euros” did not reach the supplier. The threat is then used: “We will be forced to forward your file to our litigation department if your situation is not resolved quickly.” The scammers invite you to regularize the situation by calling a specific telephone number (09 77 40 06 38) to make a bank transfer to a specified IBAN. The objective being to recover your banking data and have access to your money.
The deception is well put together, because in the content of the email, no detail has been overlooked. There is the logo of the energy supplier, a customer reference number and an invoice number. The tone used in the message is formal and the syntax is impeccable at first glance. This technique is called phishing in English: the Internet user is lured into sharing his personal data by pretending to be a trusted person/company.
How to check if an email is a scam?
To detect a fraudulent email, on its site, the ENGIE company advises its clients to check several elements, which are:
- The address of the sender of the email. Authentic email addresses at ENGIE are always constructed in a certain way ([email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; ENGIE@email-particuliers .engie.fr; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]).
- The subject of the email. If it has a worrying tone or urgency, written in capital letters, be wary.
- The email attachment. Most often, you are asked to download it, but if you do, a virus is installed on your computer or smartphone.
- The spelling and syntax of the message. If there are spelling mistakes or inconsistent turns of phrase, you are dealing with a scam.
- The logo and graphics used. If they are of poor quality or don’t match what you see on the real ENGIE website, that’s a bad sign.
- A request for banking information or personal data. “Your energy supplier will never ask you by email” this type of information, indicates ENGIE.
For its part, the gendarmerie reminds on its Facebook post that in case of doubt, it is better directly log in to your personal ENGIE account to check whether or not you have an unpaid invoice, and do not hesitate to call ENGIE customer service on 09 69 39 99 93.