Key Takeaways
- Massive data leaks in France enabled scammers to impersonate crypto exchanges and steal from panicked users.
- Scammers falsely warn users their accounts are compromised, tricking them into sending crypto to thieves.
- An August tax agency breach exposed 678K citizens, escalating a broader rise in violent French crypto crimes.
Crypto Call Scams Rise in France, Says Crypto Entrepreneur
The recent data leaks in France seem to have prompted a rise in the number of crypto scam attempts targeting customers of legit crypto exchanges.
Owen “Hasheur” Simonin, founder and CEO of Meria, a French crypto platform, has recently warned about the rise of these attacks on social media, stressing that he had personally heard about fraudulent calls where scammers impersonate customer service staff from legit platforms like Binance or even Meria.
“We’re going through a phase where data leaks are piling up in private companies as well as in the public sector: all these leaks intersect. That’s how we identify crypto holders and the platforms they use,” he declared, linking the surge of these scams with the recent data leaks that have affected millions of French citizens.
The threat actors executing these scam calls use the same playbook: they alert users that their funds are in danger and prompt them to make a quick transfer to secure them, using this sense of urgency to their advantage.
“If you panic and follow through, that’s where your money will go—to their address,” Simonin pointed out.
“A service won’t contact you out of the blue, unless you’ve reached out to them on a very specific issue. Even less so to ask you for a transaction or personal information,” Simonin clarified.
Finally, he explained that this uptick will grow further with AI adoption, as threat actors will have more compute power and will be able to automate these scam attempts.
France has been facing a rise in crypto crime, with cryptocurrency holders being increasingly targeted in so-called wrench attacks, where attackers use violence to steal crypto funds,
In August, the General Directorate of Public Finances (DGFiP), France’s tax agency, reported a data breach that allowed hackers to access the data of 678K taxpayers.