Personal training account scam: crackdown in Paris and Toulouse
A network of crooks has been dismantled in Paris and Toulouse. He offered gifts to employees in exchange for fictitious training, but invoiced, by pumping the treasury of their rights in euros.
After the massive embezzlement of money on the recovery of VAT from the carbon tax, the training market and its millions of euros, which sleep on the individual accounts of employees, are a treasure trove of choice for professionals in the scam. These highly connected scammers take advantage of flaws in the system, which allow anyone over the age of 16 with a professional activity to benefit from a credit in euros to apply for vocational training via the official platform “My training account”. An Eldorado where they just have to bait the employees to get their hands on their rights and recover the change.
A loss of 8.5 million euros
This phishing most often takes the form of an SMS or an email in a very worrying and alarmist mode: “You will lose your rights, claim your training 100% supported”. We just have to wait for the return, visibly fruitful. But last week, the specialized interregional jurisdiction of the Paris prosecutor’s office kicked in the anthill. Fourteen people were arrested, in Paris and Toulouse, as part of two separate investigations, granted by the gendarmerie around a network organized to divert funds from personal training credit (CPF). Ten men and four women, aged 20 to 50, have in particular for “organized gang scam”, “criminal association”, “forgery and use of forgery” and “laundering”. To give you an idea of the extent of these misappropriations, the Paris prosecutor’s office estimates the total damage at 8.5 million euros. Part of these funds would then have transited to foreign countries, from Germany to the United Arab Emirates via Hungary… To recover the money, the scammers used the personal data of the employees without their knowledge or offered them a “gift “, high-tech products or even cash, in return for their commitment to bogus training… But ultimately billed to the Caisse des dépôts et consignations, the body responsible for managing the CPF funds.
Holes in the racket
According to the investigators, the network had also succeeded in creating its own certification agency to qualify real fake training companies, then eligible for the CPF… The scammers had thus, completely legally, labeled nearly 300 companies in a few months. Real money pumps on the back of employees’ rights. This dragnet is a first on this scale, but there is obviously still work to restore some order to this system. There are still holes in the racket.