Fake crypto support calls rise in France as data leaks expose holders

Phone scams have now hit French crypto owners with fraudsters posing as exchange support staff in the latest wave.

The founder of Meria, Owen Simonin, known as Hasheur, blamed the calls on France’s spate of data breaches in a Sept. 20 post on X.

Scammers impersonate Binance and even Meria’s own staff

The caller says they work for a legitimate exchange, sometimes Binance, sometimes Meria itself.

The target hears the account is compromised. The fix, promises the scammer, is to move the funds to a “secure” wallet straightaway. That wallet belongs to the crook.

Simonin told holders to treat the urgency as the warning sign. A legitimate service isn’t going to call out of the blue unless a user contacted it about a particular issue, let alone to ask for a transaction or personal details, he said. He expects AI to quicken the calls.

“We’re going through a phase where data leaks are piling up in private companies as well as in the public sector,” Simonin wrote in French, according to X’s translation.

Cross-referencing those leaks identifies crypto holders and the platforms they use, he added.

Cryptopolitan reported that in mid-August, France’s tax authority, the DGFiP, said that an intruder used a stolen identity to pull personal and tax records. The breach began in late June and was closed by the end of the month.

The estimates of exposure range from 678,000 taxpayers to millions of people. Exposed fields may include names, birth information, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and tax ID numbers.

Cybermalveillance.gouv.fr logged the same pattern on January 22

State cybersecurity agency Cybermalveillance.gouv.fr flagged the pattern on January 22. Its 17Cyber help line was inundated with reports from holders contacted by fake crypto operators or fake bank anti-fraud desks that flagged suspicious wallet activity.

Callers maneuvered assets into fraudulent wallets. Some posed as police, gendarmes, customs officers, or magistrates to fish for recovery seeds and other sensitive material.

The bulletin noted a preliminary investigation into crypto firm Waltio, run by the Paris prosecutor’s cybercrime section and the national gendarmerie cyber unit.

Phone scams run alongside violent “wrench attacks,” in which criminals use physical force instead of hacking to steal coins.

In April, Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram, said that France had seen 41 kidnappings of crypto holders in the first three and a half months of 2026.

Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said France had recorded 77 kidnappings, unlawful detentions, extortions, or attempts linked to crypto by the end of June, compared with 45 in all of 2025.

About 200 people have been arrested following attacks or in preventive operations.