Has enyone else received an e-mail from their bank asking for the following information. (EU regulations compliance) This is Credit Agricole.
A copy of each account holder’s passport and driving licence and a copy of a recent utility bill. That is not too bad but they then want answers to the following questions which I find very impertinent and totally unnecessary. Supposedly to update our files.
For each of us, our yearly income
Do we rent or own our main residence
Is it a house with garden, a house or apartment
If you own the house, is it jointly owned and since when have we owned it
If you own it what is its approximate value on the market
Do we have a second home, if so what is its approximate value on the market.
Lastly our telephone numbers - this is OK but they have all that already.
What is the purpose of all this I wonder. If I don’t reply by the end of November, will they cancel my account.
The tax office has all th is information, why don’t they ask them.
If the e-mail hadn’t been from a name I recognise and informing me of a transaction, I might have thought it a scam and binned it.
It’s very impertinent… not that I’ve ever known anyone use impertinent since about 1920, but banks are private businesses and unfortunately they can ask pretty much whatever they like if you want an account with them. It’s not to do with regulations at all, there’s no real reason they need to keep asking (some banks have actually started doing this annually and it’s always framed as being because of regulations) but the regulations give the banks wriggle room that what they report/ hold on customers should be accurate, and they can be fined if it’s discovered it’s not, so in theory they could ask weekly, ‘just to check it’s accurate as per the regulations’, in reality it’s just them deciding whether they think you’re a risky customer and whether they want to continue doing business with you. When I say ‘you’ it’s of course nothing to do with you personally, they’re not sitting there worrying that Elizabeth Cox is a tax fraud ter or such, to them you’re an account number and transactions, they’re not suggesting you’re dodgy or such, they’re just doing more bureaucracy. But it is impertinent, but that’s the sort of nonsense we have to deal with if we want to do business with them.
Any messages you may have received from credit agricole can be double checked by logging into your account and checking your messages that they have sent you.
This is a link to credit agricole security page, you can get more information on how to forward the alleged email direct to credit agricole so they can enact on the mail, recently they have been giving phishing warnings when logging in by smartphone so there must a lot going around for them to raise the red flag . Alertes phishing e-mail - Crédit Agricole Normandie
If you can work out how to view the email headers - eg the instructions for how to do it in gmail are here: Trace an email with its full headers - Gmail Help copy and paste them into a DM and I’ll tell you if it looks like it is from CA
You don’t have to include the message body if you don’t want, and you can replace your own email with (eg) xxxx.yyyy@aaaa.bb.com if you like.
It wouldn’t surprise me if it were genuine though.
There’s also the last line where the OP recognises the name, which while it’s always good be cautious of course and do your due diligence on any email involving your personal information, I’m not quite sure why the first thought is that it’s a scam when it’s a very standard thing for banks to do. It could well be a scam and it’s important to check, but it certainly doesn’t “sound like a scam” as it’s what banks do to customers every day, they perhaps shouldn’t both from a security reason and an impertinence reason, but they do.
My impression is that it is genuine as the sender who is my contact at the bank carried out a transaction on my behalf even though I was going to do it myself today. I will write to him and thank him for doing so and ask why they need all that information as I have been with them since 1995 and never defaulted or been a problem to them.
Some of the questions are acceptable but a lot of it I find intrusive into my personal business which, on my banking history, can have no bearing on whether I am a risk or not. I was at the bank only last week and the clerk there asked me a lot of questions in order to update the information they held on me, so why ask again even if the information requested now is more personal.
I really was wondering if anyone else had been asked these questions recently.
I have just written to the bank and asked why they want to know some of the details requested (income, residence ownership) but also to point out that I had already answered a lot of questions a week ago when I visited the bank.
I’ve been with CA since 1989 and have never never ever had such questions asked of either me or OH in all that time. Personally if I get one, I will ring my conseilleur herself and ask her if it is genuine and for what reason. Too many good scams going round and CA keep putting the warnings on their website when you log in regarding calls and emails.
I suspect that it’s more about seeing what other services they can sell you. Every time I log in to the. CA app it asks me to update information on salary, house value, etc.
I remember having to fill in a form quite a while back about whether I was resident or not and what my tax number was but this was about the money-laundering regulations and was the only thing I’ve EVER received from Credit Agricole that asked any form of questions. I’ve been with them (and another bank aswell…belt and braces!) since the mid 1990s
You could well be right there John. I have written to ask why they want to know so much so we will see what they have to say. With all the online leaks that are happening lately, I am being a bit cautious.
I can understand the money laundering aspect Angela, but I never transfer huge amounts to CA only what we need to exist here and have been doing that since 1995. In fact I transfer less but more often than I used to.
I see the warnings and am very careful as this latest request from the bank shows. I cannot understand why so much is required when I have only just updated them with what I think is sufficient information.
No doubt my conseilleur will call as he has done in the past, but still he asks for my telephone details. They need to start reading what info they already have before demanding more.
Coincidentally I have received an email this morning from my bank, La Banque Postale, telling me not to take any notice of emails purporting to come from banks. Apart from this one that is.
As to asking anybody from CA personally I would even be wary of that. One of the reasons I kicked them into touch years ago was precisely because the local manager and another representative told me blatant and very obvious lies which cost us money.
Something else to think about. What if you did not have access to the internet whether it be permanent or temporary or your computer has to be replaced? You would not know about any emails so in the eyes of the law, anything important has to come LRAR to be correct, ordinary post not acceptable. Just a thought because not everyone has internet banking.
I don’t want to be scaremongering @Elizabeth_Cox but that really really doesn’t sound like Credit Agricole to me.
EDIT By the way, the reason, I think, for the tax details enquiry from CA was because I had changed status from non-resident to resident. That was all they asked, as well - nothing else - and I checked in person at the bank.
Sounds like a marketing sweep by their real estate department That said, HSBC have that detail on me, there may be implications for declarations they need to make for the Impôt sur la fortune immobilière.
That said, HSBC have that detail on me, there may be implications for declarations they need to make for the Impôt sur la fortune immobilière.