If you are an entrepreneur and you receive an email from the Direction Générale des Finances Publiques (DGFiP), be very careful. The “attempted scams by email or telephone usurping the email addresses and identity of DGFiP agents” multiply. The phenomenon is not new and is coming back in waves.
Nevertheless, the Ministry of Finance this time deemed the phenomenon sufficiently worrying to alert citizens by means of a press release, which adds: “a certain number of these fraud attempts usurp the identity of the Deputy Director General of Public Finances, Antoine Magnant, using various methods – emails sending a letter in his name or even telephone calls from people presenting themselves under his identity”.
Beware of fake emails from the DGFiP
The sender’s address looks like the following: [email protected] As you can see if you are a bit observant, the part after the at sign does everything to look like the official domain name of the email addresses of the Ministry of Finance, without really being so. The real official addresses of the ministry all end in @dgfip.finances.gouv.fr.
Thus, not only have the criminals replaced the dots with dashes, but as a bonus the .com domain name is impossible in the addresses of the French administration which all end in .gouv.fr. Knowing that the registration of these domain names is restricted to French administrations only.
Unfortunately, people can easily fall into the trap, especially as it can happen that the administration claims payment for an opinion by various means. Obviously the fraudulent messages, which roughly repeat the visual codes of the administration, redirect to a site under the control of pirates on which the user is invited to pay his “taxes” by credit card.
In some cases, when the scams take place by telephone, the criminals manage to get the official DGFiP number to appear on the recipient’s smartphone, making it easier to deceive their vigilance.
“We invite you to be very vigilant about the content of the messages you receive, paying particular attention to all the signs and details that may reveal that it is a fraudulent message: spelling or syntax errors, requests details of the company or its bank details, etc.”, advises the administration in its press release.
Read also – Taxes: beware of this fake refund scam
The Ministry of Finance specifies that actions are systematically taken in the event of reports “in particular technical and legal”. Have you received a strange email from the administration? Share your feedback in the comments of this article!
By: Bitdefender
