“I lost my life savings”: warning about the increase in scams involving false mortgage offers

We will call her Séverine. She wanted to testify anonymously on the 8pm news on TF1 about the scam she was a victim of last April, when she was looking to buy an apartment. “We did a credit simulation on a site which was a comparator and which immediately directed us to a broker”, she says in the report above. She does not suspect then that she is dealing with a scammer who has created a fake real estate brokerage website.

In concrete terms, he collects the personal data of his victims and builds a credit file, like any broker. Except for one detail. “It was absolutely necessary to send the personal contribution to an account that had to be created because they told us that they worked with European banks, but which have branches in France”continues Séverine. The latter pays 99,000 euros into a bank account located in Spain and will never hear from this fake broker again. “99,000 euros is unthinkable. It’s really the savings of a lifetime.”she laments. Séverine has filed a complaint, but she has little hope of ever recovering her savings.

In Nantes, it was the company of Côme Robet, president of CNCEF Crédit, which was usurped. “They used my colleague’s first and last name, created a fake email address, took our phone number. In terms of image, that inevitably put us in difficulty,” he laments. This broker had to change the name of his company and calls on everyone to be extra vigilant. “You should know that we, as a broker, have absolutely no right to collect funds. We can only be paid through our fees, and this, upon final signature.”he says.

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These mortgage scams are on the rise and cost victims an average of 12,000 euros. “There is no typical profile, anyone can be a victim. Victims are generally recruited via advertisements on social networks,” explains Caroline Bontems, head of department at the Commercial Practices Control Directorate (ACPR), to our camera. It was this organization, backed by the Banque de France, that sounded the alarm at the beginning of September by publishing a press release highlighting “warns the public against the proliferation of false offers of real estate loans or credit redemption proposed by individuals usurping the identity of brokers and credit institutions“, sometimes even in “using documents headed with logos of establishments authorized to grant credits in France“.

However, there are ways to protect yourself from these scams. “You must verify the identity of the person contacting you by calling the headquarters of the establishment they claim to represent,” advises Caroline Bontems. You can also check on the website abe-infoservice.fr the blacklist drawn up by the Banque de France, which lists hundreds of names of fake brokerage firms.