Those 35 and younger most vulnerable to falling victim to scams
PARIS (March 26, 2025) — A new report from BioCatch, which prevents financial crime by recognizing patterns in human behavior, shows France has a fraud problem. The French lost an estimated €4.5 billion to fraud in 2023 (the year with the most recently available data), 43% of all digital banking fraud in the country resulted from fake bank advisor scams, and the average scam loss of €29,000 ballooned to €69,000 for investment scams.
“While 57% of French citizens say they’ve received scam messages and 13% report having fallen victim to a scam,” BioCatch Director of Global Fraud Intelligence Tom Peacock said, “that figure swells to 72% – with 16% falling victim – among those 35 and younger. While many might find it tempting to stereotype the elderly as the most vulnerable targets for scammers, in France, data shows young people both receive more scam attempts and fall victim to those attempts more often than those from older generations.”
The report also details a spike in organized crime in France, pointing to increases in drug trafficking, human smuggling, and cybercrime (up 40% over the last four years). The French Ministry of the Interior’s cybercrime command describes how these syndicates have embraced technology to revolutionize how they launder the proceeds of these crimes.
“Increasingly, we see organized crime industrializing scams as a substantial source of its income,” BioCatch France Country Manager Matthew Platten said. “In France, investment scams have tripled over the last three years, with more than 3% of all French citizens – an estimated 22.7 million people – admitting to losing money to this scam type. Criminals almost always launder the proceeds of these scams through mule accounts, making the identification and closing of such accounts vital to combatting these criminal groups.”
BioCatch’s 2025 Digital Banking Fraud Trends in France report outlines how criminal syndicates in France and around the world scam victims into enlisting as mules, which these groups then use to launder the proceeds of a litany of other illicit schemes.
Other key report findings:
• Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) is working: Already, we’re seeing fraud rates declining on remote channels, with fraud on mobile devices dropping a whopping 68% since SCA’s introduction in September of 2019.
• Instant Payments Regulation (IPR) not a concern: Instant credit transfers are up 46% in France, but fraud rates on this payment type continue to decline. BioCatch does not yet recognize the implementation of IPR as a major concern for French Banks.
• Long-term consequences: BioCatch data shows six months after falling victim to a scam, some victims still log into their online banking accounts twice as frequently as they did before they lost any money, suggesting feelings of anxiety, mistrust, and fear.
Click here to view the complete report.
About BioCatch:
BioCatch prevents financial crime by recognizing patterns in human behavior, continuously collecting more than 3,000 anonymized data points – keystroke and mouse activity, touch screen behavior, physical device attributes, and more – as people interact with their digital banking platforms. With these inputs, BioCatch's machine-learning models reveal patterns in user behavior and provide device intelligence that, together, distinguish the criminal from the legitimate. The company’s Client Innovation Board – an industry-led initiative in partnership with American Express, Barclays, Citi Ventures, HSBC, National Australia Bank, and others – collaborates to pioneer innovative ways of leveraging customer relationships for improved fraud detection. Today, 34 of the world's largest 100 banks and 257 total financial institutions deploy BioCatch solutions, analyzing 14 billion user sessions per month and protecting 447 million people around the world from fraud and financial crime.
PR contact:
Mac King
BioCatch senior comms manager
Mac.King@BioCatch.com
