Faced with ever-developing credit card fraud and to facilitate procedures for citizens, the Ministry of the Interior, and more specifically the Center for the Fight against Digital Crime of the National Gendarmerie, has set up an internet platform which allows victims of credit card scams to report fraud online. This is the "Electronic platform for collecting bank details and their conditions of employment reported by victims of fraudulent online purchases", more simply called Perceval. In which cases should this reporting platform be used? How does Percival work? For what purposes? Our explanations.
With the development of the use of the Internet and digital tools, credit card scams in particular, and more particularly on the Internet, are changing and increasing. They are increasingly taking sophisticated forms that are not always easy to detect.
The Perceval platform, made available to the general public by the National Gendarmerie in June 2018, aims to collect and analyze the very numerous reports of disputes related to fraudulent use of the bank card for purchases made online. In its report "State of the threat related to digital 2019" made public in July 2019, the Ministerial Delegation for Security Industries and the Fight against Cyber Threats indicates that Perceval has collected since its opening more than 100,000 reports which represent 400 000 fraudulent uses of the credit card. Reports still increasing since. The scams thus identified represent an average loss of 480 euros per fraud reported, as indicated by the authors. 4,500 reports relate to damage greater than 1,500 euros.
Credit card fraud information reported by citizens via Perceval is analyzed by investigative gendarmes from the central criminal intelligence service who can thus make cross-checks and connections between these scams. These analyzes then give rise for some of them to the opening of inquiries with the public prosecutor's office and the sending of requisitions to identify the perpetrators of these frauds.
Perceval is a service accessible online 24 hours a day, 7 days a week through a personal service-public.fr account via FranceConnect. If you notice a credit card transaction on your bank accounts of which you are not the author (but only if it is a fraudulent purchase on the Internet), this service allows you to report this fraud from home on a computer, tablet or smartphone.
On the one hand, your report allows the police to be able to carry out investigations into the perpetrators of credit card scams, but it also facilitates your steps in a police station or gendarmerie to possibly file a complaint. Perceval also simplifies the formalities with your bank so that you can be reimbursed more easily and more quickly for sums stolen. Indeed, at the end of your report on the platform, and after a verification of your identity, a receipt to be sent to your bank, containing all the useful information and a personalized barcode, is given to you.
To report the fraudulent use of your credit card on Perceval, you must meet three conditions:
It should be noted that a false declaration (which does not meet these conditions) is considered an offense punishable by a fine of 7,500 euros and 6 months' imprisonment.
Reporting bank card fraud on Perceval consists in practice of filling out a form where you must indicate the number of the bank card concerned, the name of your bank, the date of the fraudulent transaction, the wording and the amount of the actual expenses, among others.
