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"You are being prosecuted for child pornography": this email scam which has made thousands of victims

2022-01-07T16:02:45.814Z


Millions of French people have been able to receive fake emails signed by hackers pretending to be the police. An attempt to


"I believed in it, unfortunately ..." At the end of November, Noémie, 19, a student in foreign languages, receives a strange e-mail signed from the general direction of the judicial police and accusing her of very serious facts. A second arrives on his mailbox four days ago. There are reports of "legal proceedings" targeting her, for acts of "child pornography, pedophilia" or even "sex trafficking (sic)". Noémie said to herself "surprised": "I have never been on child pornography sites! », She asserts. Intrigued by the multiple spelling errors contained in this email, she does some research online and discovers that it is a scam attempt to extort money from her, or even recover her personal data.

The student is far from being the only one to have received this email which may surprise on first reading. Experts from the national victim assistance system, Cybermalveillance, estimate that millions of people must have received this attempted fraud in a few months. Since the beginning of last year, prefectures across France have warned citizens about these malicious messages. “Over the past three days, our scam prevention publication has been read by over 7,000 people. It exceeded 450,000 consultations, it is the one that generates the most clicks on our site ”, reveals Jean-Jacques Latour, expert in Cybermalveillance.

⚠️ Please note that false emails from the Brigade for the Protection of Minors (BPM) have been identified!


If the email was NOT sent to an address ending in @ https://t.co/SazhZM8nRs ➡️ fraudulent email!



Do not call the BPM, investigations are already underway.

pic.twitter.com/u4ouYoM1Ih

- Police Prefecture (@prefpolice) October 1, 2020

According to him, thousands of people were able to go to the end of the scam process, going as far as losing several thousand euros each.

"It does not stop growing and improving, it is unfortunately that it works ...", regrets Jean-Jacques Latour.

So that an investigation was opened by the Paris prosecutor's office and entrusted to the Central Office for the fight against crime related to information and communication technologies (OCLCTIC), announced in early December the Ministry of the Interior .

"The victims are taken by guilt and fear"

The principle of these emails, sometimes containing an attachment - which, a priori, does not include a virus - is to make the recipient believe that he is summoned by the police for serious facts among which we find , depending on the version, child pornography, pedophilia, exhibitionism, cyber-pornography or even sex trafficking, or even all these accusations put together.

These couriers usurp the name of the national gendarmerie, sometimes the police, the Paris police headquarters or even Europol.

Read alsoShaping on the webcam, phishing and hacking, the sad top 3 cyberattacks

The victims are then invited to continue the exchange by responding by email.

Then, they are asked to make a bank transfer, presented as a fine, in order to "close the case".

The sums requested vary between 2000 and 7000 euros, according to the numerous testimonies collected by Cybermalveillance.

Another example of a fake email.

Logos, names of magistrates or officials known and recognized currently or having been in activity (sometimes with notable inconsistencies, as when the Paris police prefect Didier Lallement is described as a "brigade commander of the department for the protection of minors", working for the gendarmerie), threats of an arrest warrant or to reveal these accusations publicly… Everything is there to create panic in an interlocutor who would not understand that he is facing a malicious message.

"A magistrate whose name is mentioned in this scam email is even assailed with calls from victims wanting to defend themselves from any illegal activity", specifies Jean-Jacques Latour.

These bogus emails often contain spelling mistakes.

If it has intensified in recent months, pushing the public authorities to communicate on social networks, this scam is not new.

"We saw it appear in the summer of 2020. The delinquents, who buy lists of e-mail addresses stolen from sites, have benefited from the increase in visits to pornographic sites during confinement", explains Jean-Jacques Latour.

Indeed, in their testimonies, the victims admit having consulted sites prohibited to under 18 years.

“They feel guilty and fear having watched films with underage actresses without knowing it.

And even if they have never been on these sites, they prefer to pay for fear that it will be made public, even if it were to be a police error, ”continues the expert.

How to detect it?

Some victims would not even file a complaint, not considering that they had been the subject of a scam.

"Most of the time, they are embarked psychologically and are totally in panic", analyzes the expert in Cybermalveillance.

By the time it is time to realize the trap, the thieves' temporary bank account, often opened in a foreign bank with little regard for the identity documents necessary for its creation, has already been closed.

Read alsoThese phone scams that the Covid has detonated

Even if most Internet users quickly spot the warning signs of this scam, it is worth remembering the tips to find it.

"For this kind of facts, the police will not send you an email, but will be there early in the morning for an arrest," explains Jean-Jacques Latour.

The Ministry of the Interior also recalls that its services "never send an email to proceed to hearings".

And then, most of the time, hackers write with email addresses that do not include the official ending "@ interieur.gouv.fr".

The mails also contain syntax or spelling errors.

To report this attempted fraud and help investigators, recipients of this type of email are invited to forward them to the address fraud-bretic@interieur.gouv.fr.

Source: leparis

All news articles on 2022-01-07

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