50 Customers of French Bank Hit by Insider SIM Swap Scam Commsrisk

pA business student who was interning at Société Générale a leading multinational bank headquartered in France is believed to have fed information to SIM swappers who stole from 50 customers of the bank reports Le Parisien The interns arrest prompted officers from Frances fraud police La Brigade des Fraudes aux Moyens de Paiement BFMP to identify a series of alleged accomplices including one person who specialized in taking control of the phone service of victimsppUsing information provided by the intern the SIM swapper would call the comms providers that provided service to customers of Société Générale He would pretend to be the legitimate phone user and that his phone had been lost so a replacement SIM would be issued to him Having taken control of the victims phone service the SIM swapper would then receive the onetime passwords sent to those numbers by Société Générale With these codes the gang were able to withdraw money from the bank accounts of victims In total it is believed that more than EUR1mn USD115mn was stolen this wayppTwo other alleged accomplices were identified by police as laundering the stolen money Raids on their Parisian homes resulted in the discovery of an unspecified amount of cash and 15 luxury designer handbags from top brands including Dior Louis Vuitton Chanel Hermès Balenciaga and Givenchy One of these suspected accomplices is a 26 year old male national of Chad with a history of violence He is said to have conducted the money laundering in conjunction with a woman who was not previously known to policeppAnother alleged accomplice is a 24 year old man from France who is suspected of creating the fake IDs used by the gang A police search of his home resulted in the seizure of equipment for the making of fake identity cards and fake documents Numerous SIM cards were also seized from the property The suspect has a record of engaging in fraud forgery and assaultppAll the victims of this gang had their losses reimbursed Société Générale emphasized that they have controls to prevent fraud Nevertheless it is concerning that an intern would be able to gather data about customers and pass it on to criminal accomplices without the pattern of behavior being identified soonerppThere were approximately 500 cases of fraud involving employees of French Banks during 2024 according to Frances banking association the Fédération Bancaire Française FBF The threat of insider fraud needs to be taken more seriously as criminal syndicates can exploit electronic communication to commit crimes more rapidly than ever beforeppThe reporting of this news by Le Parisien can be found hereppDuring his career Eric has been a Director of Risk Management for a national telco a widelytravelled consultant a Chief Marketing Officer for a software business the Chief Executive of the Risk Assurance Group and the publisher of Commsrisk since its launch in 2006 Look here for more about the history of Commsrisk and the role played by EricppThe comms providers that Eric has worked for include Qatar Telecom Cable Wireless TMobile Sky and Worldcom He is a public speaker a ghostwriter a qualified chartered accountant and a subject matter expert in scam prevention consumer protection enterprise risk management data integrity and billing accuracy Eric was also the lead author of Revenue Assurance Expert Opinions for Communications Providers published by CRC Press Eric can be reached through the contact form on this websiteppCommsrisks Global Fraud Dashboard uses AI to collate update and visualize data about network abuses from around the world 11 maps and graphs are included at launch more are in the pipeline See the Global Fraud Dashboard hereppGSMA Call Check is a cheaper simpler and universal method for telcos to verify the actual origin of a call and thus prevent CLI spoofing But hardly anyone has compared its strengths and weaknesses with those of its betterknown rival STIRSHAKENppClick on this link for a downloadable slide pack that analyzes a crucial choice facing the global comms industryppIt is not enough to report on the work promoted by others We also need goals Otherwise news and analysis can be overwhelmed by marketing Commsrisk has adopted three editorial objectives for 2025pp1 Promote the use of GSMA Call Check a cheap and effective way of determining if a call has been spoofedpp2 Promote the consistent application of cheap and effective knowyourcustomer KYC checks for businesses that intend to communicate in bulkpp3 Promote the implementation of cheap and effective phone honeypots and other objective measures of scam and spam activityppfunctionwindowfnamesnew Arraywindowftypesnew Arrayfnames0EMAILftypes0mergefnames1FNAMEftypes1mergefnames2LNAMEftypes2mergefalsejQueryvar mcjjQuerynoConflicttrueppArticles copyright the author all else copyright Revenue Protect Limitedp