the gendarmerie warns of a new form of scam on Amazon

Scammers are currently sending letters on Amazon letterhead, counting on victims to make money. One of these letters was sent to the home of an investigator specializing in scams in Haute-Savoie, which made it possible to discover this new form of scam.

He who thinks he takes is taken. Believing they are scamming a victim, the crooks actually came across a police officer specializing in tracking down these criminals. Chief Warrant Officer Nicolas Renaud, gendarme in the judicial support cell of the Haute-Savoie departmental gendarmerie group, recently received at his home in Annecy, a letter that was, to say the least, special in his personal mailbox.

On a card with Amazon letterhead and formatted in the colors of the American company, this policeman reads these words: “We offer each member a free item for testing and a commission of a certain amount. (The commission amount depends on the price of the item, up to €40).” The card which invites him to test products for remuneration is accompanied by a QR Code.

Seized with doubt, Nicolas Renaud rereads the letter and notices several inconsistencies. “What tipped me off was the quality of the support, the printing, the closing words of the letter: ‘all my best wishes’, and above all an email address that did not correspond not Amazon at all.” The investigator does not stop there, he shows the mail to his colleagues and the investigations begin.

“This is the first time we’ve been faced with this.”

Nicolas Renaud, chief warrant officer

at franceinfo

What concerns the gendarmes in this technique is the process “old“, used on purpose by scammers. They avoid sending an email, which could quickly have been considered spam, and instead favor the postal route. Thus, they hope to deceive the vigilance of their victims by counting on the serious side of a classic mail delivery.

Except that this specialized investigator makes no mistake, and by flashing the QR code he discovers the scam. “Victims must give as much information about themselves as possible: their first and last names, etc. (…) The objective is to recover names, email addresses, bank card numbers.” Once obtained, this data can either be resold on the darkweb or used later.

A scam costing several thousand euros

In this second case, the scammers’ technique is well established. They “call the victims three or four weeks later and introduce themselves as their bank advisor. The criminals say they have detected atypical transactions on their victim’s account, mention the correct first and last names and correct bank details so as not to alert the victim. deciphers Nicolas Renaud.

“As she has obviously forgotten the form that she received weeks before in her mailbox, she is convinced that she is in line with her own banking establishment.” And this is where the scammers take action: they get victims to confidently validate banking transactions and succeed in extracting money, sometimes several thousand euros.

This formidable practice is, by this gendarme’s own admission, very difficult to counter. Scammers take advantage of the head start they have to transfer the stolen money to different accounts, known as “rebound”, to ultimately get the money out of the European Union and thus complicate the work of investigators. “It is increasingly difficult, because criminals are exploiting the evolution of society and its weaknesses. There is also the ease of access to digital tools by these cyber crooks.

“It’s very difficult to put these structures back together.”

Nicolas Renaud

at franceinfo

A feeling also confirmed by the Ministry of the Interior’s own figures, according to which the rate of clarification of investigations for fraud has fallen by 12 points in five years, between 2017 and 2022. The Ministry of the Interior explains this decline by “the increasingly sophisticated operating methods of criminals which make investigations more complicated”according to the recent note from the Ministerial Statistical Service for Internal Security (SSMSI).

Nicolas Renaud, the gendarme specializing in the fight against scams also makes this analysis. “There is also an evolution in the banking landscape, because now in a few clicks, you can make almost instantaneous transfers abroad, while we, the police, it takes us several days, even several weeks to locate and try to block the funds that would have gone abroad.” At this stage of the investigation, which is just beginning, it is impossible to know how many people were scammed because of this new scheme.