Six companies of the Indexia group are in the dock for deceptive commercial practices

Claire, an independent photographer, hopes “recover(s) the marbles” : she is one of the 800 people who are bringing a civil action with the CFDT, for this major trial which opens this Monday, September 23. Six companies of the Indexia group – specialized in insurance for telephones and multimedia products, as well as their director Sadri Fegaie, will be tried before the 31st correctional chamber of the Paris judicial court.

They are accused of misleading commercial practices. More specifically, the manager and the companies SARL SFK Group, SFAM Celside Insurance, Foriou, Cyrana, Hubside, Serena are accused of having had hundreds of consumers take out insurance contracts for their multimedia devices and of having developed a complex procedure aimed at discouraging them from their requests for termination or reimbursement, between 2014 and 2022.

Concretely, consumers were offered, at the time of their purchase, in Fnac-Darty stores between 2017 and 2019, but also in the Indexia group’s own stores, Hubside Store, so-called affinity insurance for around fifteen euros per month. Years later, hundreds of them have seen the deductions multiply, reaching up to tens of thousands of euros in total, without having signed an amendment or claiming never to have even signed an insurance contract.

Claire realizes that she has nothing left “almost nothing”

This is the case of Claire, who had a total of 26,000 euros taken from one of her accounts. “Every morning, my first instinct is now to look at this account”she says. Her problems date back to October 2017, when her partner went to a Fnac-Darty store to buy her a new computer. When it came time to pay, the salesperson offered her a two-year theft and breakage insurance policy for €15.99 per month.

“He asked me for my bank details and I gave him the details of an account that I never looked at and which contained the end of my parents’ inheritance.”says the forty-year-old. It was only in October 2023, when she wanted to use the money in this account, that Claire realized that she only had “almost nothing”. On her account, she notes countless withdrawals with random names and amounts. Over the period, the amount of withdrawals and their frequency have continued to increase: 47 euros for the year 2017 and up to 18,000 euros between January and October 2023.

An investigation opened by the fraud squad in 2018

Another testimony provides a glimpse of the perfidy of this gigantic scam. In June 2022, it was through a telephone canvassing by the company Hubside that Issa Diop was fooled, lured by the promise of free equipment, in exchange for a subscription to a loyalty program at ” 10 euros per month ».

“I called them several times to tell them that I had not received anything, but that they had started to charge me anyway.”he says. In July, Issa noticed 10 withdrawals of 49.99 euros from his account. The 53-year-old man, on RSA at the time of the events, estimates that he was deducted 4,000 euros between June and October 2022.

So many abused customers who get no response from the companies concerned. Reports had been made to the consumer association UFC-Que Choisir, following which, an investigation by the fraud squad was opened in 2018.

And the result of the investigation was striking: the General Directorate for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) pointed out “ practices of falsely leading consumers wishing to stop direct debits, cancel their subscriptions and be reimbursed for the amounts withdrawn after termination of their contract to believe that their requests were taken into account, or even effective ».

The CFDT is a civil party in the trial

The investigation ended in 2019 with a criminal transaction with a “transactional fine” of 10 million euros, according to the daily. The World. Despite everything, the complaints continued, people denounced requests for termination and reimbursement never applied. At least 1,500 victims have already come forward in this procedure. The company undertakes to compensate consumers who request it.

But the daily newspaper reports that the promise was only partially kept and the DGCCRF is continuing its investigations. The repression then forwarded the case to the public prosecutor in April 2022, accusing SFAM, several subsidiaries and the manager Sadri Fegaie, of falsely making consumers believe that their requests to stop direct debits or cancel subscriptions had been taken into account, as well as obstructing the investigation.

In addition to the injured parties, the CFDT Banking and Insurance Federation is also a civil party in the trial. Its lawyer, Maître Thomas Hollande, justifies this approach by the seriousness of the faults and the extent of the damages suffered, also for “the employees of the company”including the consequences due to the group’s bad reputation, such as the difficulty of finding a job. So many negative repercussions for the group’s employees, including after the liquidation of the holding company Indexia and several of its entities on 22 May, one month after that of SFAM, the group’s parent company.