Scams and fraud by phone increase and are not almost disappearing. To protect yourself, the best solution is to detect suspicious requests.
Frauds with scriptural means of payment, that is to say checks, bank cards and transfers, have continued to increase in recent years, as online payment and smartphones are democratized. And among them, it was particularly the so -called “manipulation” fraud that exploded, with a significant increase in scams to the false banking advisor. This type of scam has been greatly facilitated by the technique of “spoofing”, a method allowing a crook to reveal the telephone number of a bank or an institution on the telephone of its potential victim.
Fortunately, the trend seems to stabilize for a year, under the combined action of public authorities and the awareness of citizens. On the one hand, the deployment of the authentication mechanism of numbers (MAN) since October 1, 2024 has made it possible to very sharply reduce the usurpation of official telephone numbers, those of banks or police stations for example, by crooks. On the other hand, the generalization of strong authentication methods, via the reception of an SMS code or validation by a dedicated application, has also helped to strengthen the overall security of transactions.
However, fraud for means of payment are not almost disappearing, and although their amount accumulated in euros is in slight decline, their number in absolute value increased slightly in 2024. And manipulation fraud may even become more and more sophisticated, and more and more difficult to detect, even for people aware. Indeed, the boom in “artificial intelligence” tools and the multiplication of massive leaks of personal data provide scammers new means to refine their attacks and bypass existing protective measures.
Although the crooks can no longer, for the moment, usurp the fixed telephone numbers of business or official institutions, they can rely on very precise personal information to credible their attacks with their victims. Date and place of birth, personal address and even bank account number are all sensitive personal data that have been for sale on the web in recent years, following massive data flight, like the one who affected the operator Free last year.
Similarly, the new applications called “generative artificial intelligence” spread and offer crooks to set up ever more credible attacks, the ultimate being the appearance of “hypertructures” (deepfakes) that imitate the voice or face of a known or confidence person. If this type of approaches is still rare at the moment, there is no doubt that they will multiply in the coming years, as the “generative artificial intelligence” tools and applications will proliferate in society.
Even if technical countermeasures will certainly be implemented, by the public authorities and by companies, the best defense will remain the vigilance and insight of individuals. So whatever the channel (SMS, telephone call) by which a person contacts you, and the “credibility” of communication (personal information, authoritarian voice), certain requests must alert you and push you to immediately put an end to the ‘exchange.
So, if your interlocutor asks you to Transmit a temporary identification codewhether received by SMS or generated via an authentication application, It is necessarily a crook. In the same way, if your correspondent asks you to Validate a connection, authentication or payment request via a dedicated application Like Google Authenticator, He is also a scammerand you do not have to execute yourself.
In general, No professional or representative of a public institution will never ask you to carry out an action on your phone at your request. Your bank advisor, for example, absolutely does not need you to block a transfer or fraudulent direct debit, and a representative of the police cannot ask you to pay a fine of parking by phone. So never give in to panic or pressure, and remember that Someone who contacted you by phone to ask you to do something is always suspicious.