A phishing attempt (illustration) -
Geeko
At the beginning of September, a young man received an email with the subject and sender: "Central Directorate of the National Judicial Police".
The address was hosted in Outlook, while the police use “gouv.fr” addresses.
The content of the message was enough for this person to recognize a
phishing
attempt
, reports
Numerama
.
The body of the message contains the text "See PDF document", written in blue, and an attachment named "Central Directorate of the National Judicial Police-convert-compressed.pdf".
Without a trace of malware, the email successfully passed the antispam filter of the young man's Wanadoo address without difficulty, thus ending up directly in his inbox.
8,500 euros "criminal fine"
By clicking on the attachment,
Numerama
was able to discover a document stamped in the colors of the judicial police but riddled with grammatical errors and anachronisms.
The letter informs that the person is the subject of "several legal proceedings"
including "child pornography
"," The exhibitionist "or even the" sex trafficking "
(sic) and that it is necessary to contact an address hosted on Gmail to provide justifications.
After several exchanges of emails, the criminals sent a bank account details and asked for the sum of 8,500 euros "criminal fine", payable in two installments, otherwise legal proceedings would be launched and the case would be made public.
It was a
phishing
attempt
, a
technique well known, but not really mastered by these hobbyist hackers who turned out to be harmless.
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