A new scam has been attacking many French people for several months: by sms, they receive a message inviting them to update their vital card via a fake official site.
- The Vitale card is a smart card containing the administrative information useful for taking charge of your care.
- The healthcare professional you consult (doctor, dentist, etc.) uses your Vitale card to create an electronic treatment sheet which replaces the paper treatment sheet.
If you receive a text message asking you to update your Vitale card, do not answer it, it’s a scam! For several months, it has targeted millions of French people.
Draining of bank accounts
Concretely, the sms refers to a site very similar to that of the Health Insurance. There, the victim is asked for his address in order to send him a new official document, against a few euros paid online. The crooks thus recover the bank card numbers and can puncture the account.
“They asked me for my bank details and to pay 84 cents. Afterwards I had no further news. I told myself that I should have been much more vigilant”, testifies a woman on France Info. Jean-Jacques Latour, director of expertise for the victim assistance platform cybermalveillance.gouv.fr, explains: “The scammer will have all the information to be able to give credibility to his attack. He will call you, tell you ‘You are indeed Mr. or Mrs. so and so who lives in such a place and who has such a bank card number’. And there, he announcing fraud on his bank card, the victim is given confidence. She will be able to give in to the various manipulations that the cybercriminal will make him do.”
How to update your vital card ?
As a reminder, updating a vital card is totally free and is done at terminals in pharmacies. The Health Insurance never asks to carry out such a procedure by telephone. More generally, all official procedures involving the communication of personal data, in particular at the level of banks and insurance companies, are never done via a call or text exchanges, but always in person.