- Unlike other popular scams, this one happens face-to-face at your doorstep.
- The scammer pretends to be a technician from the operator who comes to make a repair
Scams come in all shapes and sizes and are unfortunately becoming more frequent. When we talk about online scams, they most likely start with a mysterious call and a synthetic voice, or an SMS with a fraudulent link or even a WhatsApp message sent from Bosnia and Herzegovina, but not all scams are online. Some are done face to face and this is precisely what is happening in France with the so-called “fiber optic scam”.
An increasingly worrying scam. According to local media such as Le Parisien, RMC, Capital, L’Indépendant and PhonAndroid, this scam has been around for some time and its operation is always the same. It all starts with a fake technician knocking on the door and claiming to come into the home to make a series of repairs. The reason? Network saturation. This takes the potential victim by surprise, who has not been warned by their operator because, well, there is no real incident.
Scams at the door. According to statements from a neighbor who was on the verge of being a victim of this scam, collected by Actu Toulouse, the fake technician told him “that there was a problem with my bandwidth and that he had been asked to come and repair it at my house to increase it.” The excuse was that the fiber was saturated and that the town hall was going to change providers to install a less saturated one. Distrustful, he called the operator and confirmed that no maintenance operation was planned.
The “technician”, however, went on to explain that he worked for another operator and offered him “a better speed offer.” Days later, another fake technician appeared at this person’s door again using “exactly the same conditions as the first one.” In a local Facebook group, other people have reported the presence of a person who claims to work for the Free operator and who goes door to door.
And what happens? Most likely, if the “technician” enters the house, everything will end with a robbery in a moment of inattention. It is also possible that a survey is being carried out in the houses to look for more vulnerable victims to a robbery. In any case, all this has an easy solution: information and mistrust first.
The issue of saturated fibre… Our wireless network can become saturated because we have too many devices connected, the CTO box can become saturated, the network can go down, but saying that we are going to change fibre provider because the previous one is saturated is absurd. As the French company Orange explains, “it is the infrastructure operator (Orange, SFR…) that installs fibre in an area. If a client changes contract, they will always be on the same network, so this proposal makes no sense.”