“Hello BlaBlaCar! You are the victim of repeated scams on your site! Quite a few fake accounts (sic) to extract money. "
On Twitter, as La Dépêche spotted, several Internet users recently complained of phishing behavior on the BlaBlaCar carpooling platform.
Phishing - phishing in English - is for a crook to pretend to be a company or administration with established presence in order to extract information or money from its users.
In the case of the scams described by Internet users on BlaBlaCar, the false driver thus posts an ad, then assures passengers that he is having difficulties with the BlaBlaCar secure payment system, and cancels the trip.
The same scammer then sends a link to a malicious site, which looks like the real carpool platform, asking passengers to fill in their bank details in order to pay for it.
And that's how he traps them.
Isolated cases
“These are rare cases,
however, assured Adeline Prévost, press relations manager at BlaBlaCar, at the
La Dépêche site
.
These are situations that we monitor, and as soon as reports are made, we immediately block the affected profiles. ”
And remember that all payments must go through the platform and that it is a good idea to look at the profiles of the drivers - in particular the experience and comments of former passengers - before booking a trip. Finally, as Adeline Prevost reminds us, for the victims of a phishing attempt,
"the good reflex is not to follow up and immediately inform BlaBlaCar"
via the driver's report on the platform.
