The price of electricity increased by 43% between February 2022 and February 2024. To cope with this explosion in prices, many French people have chosen to become illegal. On Snapchat or Telegram, traffickers offer to intervene at home on the Linky meter. Through a simple operation, they would be able to reduce the household electricity bill by 70%, ultimately generating a significant shortfall for Enedis, reports TF1 Info.
A simple intervention
“Since 2022, electricity theft has increased by two terawatt hours. It's as if Charente-Maritime had stopped paying for electricity. This represents a cost of 250 million euros,” testified Bertrand Boutteau, director of Enedis’ “loss and fraud” department. Gradually installed in all homes over the past nine years, not without resistance, Linky meters had been presented as inviolable.
However, many criminals seem to have found a way to distort the calculation of the meter by virtually reducing the number of volt-amperes in the device. “It’s very simple, even a teenager could do it […] I have absolutely no training as an electrician. If you know how to use your ten fingers, it works very well,” one of these traffickers told our colleagues, showing how he carries out the operation in less than seven minutes.
Fraudsters systematically detected
This man, who also works as a mechanic, was looking for additional income. He found training on Snapchat for 1,500 euros to learn how to tamper with the meters. Since then, he charges his interventions between 350 euros for an individual and 600 euros for a professional, which gives him a total of 2,000 to 3,000 euros extra at the end of the month.
The fact remains that traffickers and fraudsters expose themselves to significant risks. The latter are punishable by three years of imprisonment and a fine of 45,000 euros, in addition to regularization which can sometimes reach several thousand euros. And bad news: Enedis’ “loss and fraud” service claims to have identified all the cheaters using anomaly detection algorithms. To control the more than 100,000 tampered with meters identified in France, Enedis will double the number of service intervention agents in 2025, thus increasing the bill for all French people. Many surprise checks will be carried out.
