30,000 euros. “Frankly, it’s a gold scam!” This is what it would have cost Cannes establishments according to Alain Lahouti, the boss of the Union of trades and hotel industries.
This professional union sounded the alarm in May by relaying a well-established modus operandi which appeared in the middle of the film festival. “We started having victims the second week and for two weeks”he specifies, estimating at ten the number of establishments targeted by this scam at payment terminals.
A sleight of hand
The judicial police of Nice, which was seized of the facts, evokes as for it “three or four complaints all confined to Cannes and the period of the Festival”.
But it seems that the criminals have moved to other tourist areas. Our colleagues from Parisian report new similar facts in the Pyrénées-Orientales in July.
The procedure is the same each time. A scammer pretending to be a customer comes to consume in a busy bar or restaurant. “It is generally beautiful establishments that are targeted”, emphasizes Alain Lahouti. The criminal hides a bank card payment terminal in his bag. And when it’s time to pay, he takes advantage of the server’s distraction to substitute his TPE for that of the establishment.
They realize after a few days
All subsequent payments will go to another company’s account.
The Siret number appearing on credit card receipts refers to Seine-et-Marne. This company-specific identification code is really the only way to discover the scam… usually much too late. Some restaurateurs only realized that they had their recipe stolen after a few days. Instead of being transferred to their account, credit card payments garnished that of the criminals.
A few years ago already in Nice…
This modus operandi is quite similar to the one foiled a few years ago in Nice. Already at the time, criminals from Eastern countries had “placed” hacked payment terminals in several stores on Avenue Jean-Médecin.
Their ultra-sophisticated toys made it possible at the time to record the digital bands and the codes of the bank cards which were introduced into them. A formidable booty that the criminals then recovered remotely via a Bluetooth connection.
Financial crime is doubling in ingenuity and continues to develop with digital uses.
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