Short-time work fraud amounts to more than 200 million euros.
On the one hand, the bosses who benefit from it while making their employees work.
On the other, a well-organized network of crooks based abroad.
If the former are easy to spot, the latter give the authorities a hard time.
Most French people find it a means of survival for their business.
But others, less well-intentioned, see it as a very lucrative fraudulent tool.
Since this summer, the Paris prosecutor's office has been investigating massive partial unemployment fraud.
In mid-September, it already represented 225 million euros, according to the Ministry of Labor.
If the authorities' controls have made it possible to block certain illegitimate requests, fraud still attracts envy.
Professional crooks based abroad
There are of course the small bosses who benefit from the measure while continuing to make their employees work.
But the reinforced controls and the lengthened study deadlines (from 48 hours in the spring to 15 days today) make it possible to identify them better.
What primarily occupies investigators are professional crooks, often based abroad.
Their technique is simple: spoof the SIRET numbers of companies, freely accessible on the Internet, in order to associate their RIB with them.
They then transfer the released funds to accounts abroad.
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More than 7,000 French companies were thus trapped.
"These groups use very sophisticated methods with a division of the tasks. There are those who will provide lists of potential victims and those who provide the laundering aspect, ie the flow of money from account to account. worldwide. This is where we end up with major phenomena, "describes Anne Sophie Coulbois, patron of the central office for the repression of serious financial crime.
Its teams are working on around thirty cases of this type.