CPF: Personal Training Account Fraud ‘Get Worse’ In 2021
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The only CPF fraud uncovered by Tracfin in 2021 was €43.2 million compared to €7.8 million the previous year.
FRAUD – Personal Training Account (CPF) fraud has been on the rise and evolving, Tracfin revealed in its annual report on Wednesday, July 27. you represent “clearly a very important part” in 2021 of the activities of Bercy’s Financial Intelligence Unit, according to its director Guillaume Valette-Valla.
The CPF, which has existed since January 1, 2019, enables every active person to acquire training rights in euros and no longer in hours via an online platform. It is the Caisse des dépôts (CDC) that directly pays the training companies, which are sometimes empty shells trying to siphon off public funds.
Fraud up to 43.2 million euros
And those empty shells abounded in 2021. Suspicious transaction reports submitted to Tracfin — alerts sent by professionals like the CDC or banks that suspect abuse — rose to 116, up from just 10 in 2020. Thus, the only frauds reported were the discovered by Tracfin in 2021 represented 43.2 million euros compared to 7.8 million euros the previous year, the Bercy cell underlines in its report.
At the same time, fraud methods have evolved, observes Guillaume Valette-Valla. In 2020, scams started popping up “classic systems of identity theft of the beneficiaries”, he recalls. In the meantime, however, the networks have become much more professional and now include transnational criminal organizations, especially outside the EU.
In particular, they have adapted to strengthened authentication for access to the CPF, which was put in place to limit identity theft. Now use them in particular“Subscription of multiple people belonging to the same network to fictitious training or not actually followed” or even at “Promotion and incentives for registrations through retrocession offers to trainees who are beneficiaries of the CPF in the form of gifts, cards
Prepaid or Referral Commissions ».
Persistence of the Covid aid scam
Despite its very rapid development, the CPF scam is far from the only public aid program to fall victim to fraud, as Tracfin notes that emergency aid scams still exist in the context of the Covid-19 crisis. Fraud in short-time work compensation, solidarity funds and state-guaranteed loans represented a financial investment of more than 16 million euros.
Tracfin, which has also been involved in tracing the assets of Russian oligarchs under European sanctions against Moscow since the invasion of Ukraine, reckons with the financial and non-financial assets frozen in France since the conflict began.
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