Financial Scams, Influencers, Hidden Fees: What the 2025 Annual Report of the ACPR-AMF Joint Unit Reveals

ACPR-AMF Joint Unit, 2025 Annual Report, published in June 2026

What Is the ACPR-AMF Joint Unit and What Is It For?

The Joint Unit (Pôle commun) is the coordination body between the two main regulators of the French financial sector: the Prudential Supervision and Resolution Authority (Autorité de contrôle prudentiel et de résolution, ACPR), attached to the Banque de France, which supervises banks and insurers, and the Financial Markets Authority (Autorité des marchés financiers, AMF), which oversees markets, asset management companies and investment advisers.

In practical terms, the Joint Unit met eleven times in 2025 and runs four thematic working groups. It oversees the ABE Infoservice website (Assurance Banque Épargne Infoservice), which recorded more than 1.1 million page views and around 820,000 visits in 2025, as well as the telephone platform available on 34 14, the Banque de France’s single number. It is on this site that the well-known blacklists of unauthorised websites and operators are published, a tool of prime importance for any saver approached by an overly insistent “adviser”.

The Joint Unit’s annual report is therefore a valuable document: it aggregates the findings of the two authorities on scams, financial advertising and the commercial practices of professionals. Reading it informs both savers who want to protect themselves and victims who are trying to understand what happened to them, and what they can draw from it in the courts.

What Does the 2025 Report Reveal About the Scale of Financial Scams?

Which Figures Should You Remember?

The overall finding is unequivocal: financial scams remain, in the report’s own words, “a phenomenon of constant concern”. Three sets of figures deserve attention.

First, the prevalence of the phenomenon. According to the latest edition of the AMF savings and investment barometer, 16% of French people surveyed said in 2025 that they had already been victims of a financial scam. Relative to the adult population, this percentage gives the measure of a mass phenomenon, a long way from the handful of widely reported cases.

Next, blacklist activity. In 2025, the AMF and the ACPR added 1,351 new names of unauthorised websites or operators to their six blacklists published on ABE Infoservice, compared with 1,459 names in 2024. In total, 9,269 names were listed on these blacklists as at 31 December 2025. The slight decrease in additions does not reflect a decline in fraud: fake investments are recycled, change domain names and reappear in other guises. These blacklists alone accounted for nearly 260,000 views on the site.

Finally, the explosion in identity theft: nearly 891 cases were recorded in 2025. Remarkably, the authorities themselves are targeted. The ACPR identified 50 impersonations of its identity: phishing attempts by email, requests to pay supposed fees to “unlock” false promises of gifts or inheritance, fake loans. The AMF identified 64 emails or URLs impersonating its identity or that of its staff, i.e. more than a quarter of the impersonations it reports, a sharp increase compared with 2024 (47 cases). In most cases, the fraudsters present themselves as AMF agents tasked with helping scam victims recover their funds: this is the scam within the scam, targeting people already weakened by a first loss.

What Methods Did Fraudsters Use in 2025?

The report describes a fraud landscape that is evolving rapidly. Fake financial investments mostly involve purported investments in crypto-assets, as well as FOREX (the foreign exchange market). For its part, the ACPR notes the persistence of fake savings account and fake loan scams: those “super savings accounts” at 6 or 8% that exist only on the forged letterhead of a real bank.

A novelty highlighted by the AMF: more and more investment proposals are circulating through private messaging apps such as WhatsApp. The regulator has publicly called for vigilance in the face of the supposed stock market “hot tips” circulating there. These closed channels by nature escape conventional advertising monitoring and create a false intimacy conducive to manipulation.

The ABE Infoservice website has also been enriched with content on two fast-growing techniques: “money mule” fraud on social networks, where the victim is recruited to pass funds of fraudulent origin through his or her own account, thereby exposing themselves to prosecution, and the hijacking of telephone lines by fraudsters, which notably enables calls displaying a real bank’s number (the technique known as telephone spoofing, which we have analysed on several occasions on this blog in connection with fake bank adviser scams).

In the face of this threat, the Joint Unit has emphasised prevention: around fifty new items published on ABE Infoservice, videos on crowdfunding and money mules, and the launch in December 2025 of the “BaWé” campaign aimed at 18-34 year olds on YouTube and TikTok, which had totalled more than 9.1 million views by the end of the year. The educational effort is real. But prevention, by its nature, compensates no one: for those whose savings have already vanished, the question is no longer “how to avoid the scam” but “how to obtain redress”.

What to Do if You Have Already Paid Over Funds

This is where the report shows its limits, which is only natural, since that is not its purpose. The authorities raise the alarm, keep records and pass cases on to the competent departments (police, public prosecutor, DGCCRF), but they do not compensate victims and do not compel banks to reimburse. The path to compensation runs through other channels: disputing the transactions with the bank and, where appropriate, legal action.

Two reflexes are essential. The first: act quickly with your bank, disputing the contested transactions in writing. Where the funds left following unauthorised payment transactions (the typical case of the fake adviser who gets transfers validated), it is for the bank to prove that the transaction was authenticated and properly executed; the regime of Articles L. 133-18 et seq. of the Monetary and Financial Code is largely favourable to the customer. The second reflex: take care over your statements. What you write to your bank and what you state in your complaint can win or lose your case. We have devoted a complete guide to this subject: Bank Fraud: What to Say and Not to Say to Your Bank and in Your Complaint.

Finally, it should be noted that, beyond the regime for unauthorised transactions, banks are bound by precise technical obligations under the regulatory technical standards (RTS) supplementing the second Payment Services Directive (PSD2): strong authentication, transaction monitoring, detection of anomalies. This ground, still under-used in litigation, can usefully supplement a victim’s arguments where the bank let through transactions with a manifestly abnormal pattern.

Influencers and Financial Advertising: Why Is Vigilance Essential?

The second major part of the report: advertising monitoring. In 2025, 4,543 advertisements were analysed within the Joint Unit. The AMF identifies three underlying trends.

First trend: a marked increase in advertisements for investment services (mainly investment advice and portfolio management on behalf of third parties), which represented 12% of all communications analysed in 2025, compared with less than 3% in 2024. Second trend: the appearance of communications encouraging investment in “high-impact” products in sectors such as defence, health or digital, which turn social issues into thematic investment opportunities. Third trend: a resurgence of arguments based on tax advantages, driven in particular by the FCPI (innovation investment fund) advertising campaigns noted in the last quarter of 2025 and by the enthusiasm for the retirement savings plan (plan d’épargne retraite, PER): 41% of savers said in 2025 that they had invested in the stock market or property through a PER, compared with 24% in 2022, and advertisements for PERs and FCPIs accounted for 12% of the advertisements recorded by the AMF.

On the life insurance side, the ACPR has changed its method: advertising monitoring is now based on a risk-based approach rather than an exhaustive analysis, with particular attention to communications highlighting non-financial arguments (sustainability, impact). These “green” advertisements rose by 22% in 2025, after a fall of nearly 50% in 2024.

But the most significant point for individuals concerns influencers. The ACPR’s survey of advertisements disseminated on social networks included a section dedicated to influencers, whose videos overwhelmingly concerned accounts and means of payment. Result: more than a quarter of the advertisements analysed lacked clarity, such as highlighting the free nature of a service actually included in a paid subscription, or omitting applicable fees. Individual reminders were sent to the operators concerned, and the ACPR announces a new survey for 2026 on banking advertisements on social networks and in traditional media.

On the financial markets side, the AMF notes that promotion of crypto-asset platforms remains very significant on social networks, fuelled by affiliate programmes that pay the influencer for each new sign-up. Since the Act of 9 June 2023 on commercial influence, affiliate links must be made visible; failing that, the AMF reminds those concerned of the rules. Above all, where the promoted platform is not authorised to provide its services in France, the AMF places it on a blacklist and informs the DGCCRF of the illegal promotion: fourteen influencer promotions were thus referred to the DGCCRF in 2025. The two authorities have also strengthened their cooperation with the professional advertising regulatory authority (Autorité de régulation professionnelle de la publicité, ARPP): the ACPR signed a partnership agreement with the ARPP at the end of June 2025, the AMF having had its own since 2011, which made it possible to launch in 2023 a certificate for responsible influence in finance.

For the saver, the lesson is simple: an influencer’s recommendation is neither regulated investment advice nor a guarantee of reliability. In a significant proportion of cases, it is paid advertising whose transparency failings are documented by the regulator itself. And when an investment recommended by an influencer goes wrong, this official finding can support the victim’s case.

Fees and Conflicts of Interest: What Do the Coordinated Checks Reveal?

The third part, less widely reported but full of lessons: checks on commercial practices. In 2025, 30 inspections opened by the two authorities were discussed within the Joint Unit. One led to statements of objections, another to a follow-up letter. Of the inspections opened in 2024, six led in 2025 to statements of objections and ten to follow-up letters. These inspections cover the marketing process, the quality of the information provided, the management of conflicts of interest and the handling of complaints.

The AMF and the ACPR also analysed a set of inspections carried out over five years to assess the application of the European directives on insurance distribution and on markets in financial instruments, as well as the regulation on pre-contractual information for packaged products (PRIIPs). The assessment is mixed: practices are improving, but further progress is expected on product governance, the duty to advise and the management of conflicts of interest.

The concrete cases noted in the report deserve to be cited, because they describe situations that many savers experience without knowing it:

In discretionary management, the AMF’s latest inspection mission on investment services providers highlights investments made almost systematically in the fund units carrying the highest fees, even though a cheaper alternative (“clean share”) existed, a practice expressly described as contrary to clients’ interests. The provider also benefited from the advice of an asset management company in its own group to select its investment universe, a conflict-of-interest situation insufficiently regulated.

Among financial investment advisers marketing units in property investment companies (SCPI) or structured products, the AMF found failings in the disclosure of fees: partner remuneration and intermediation commissions not mentioned, service fees and product fees not aggregated, third-party commissions omitted. In one case, the variable part of advisers’ remuneration could be more than five times the fixed part, and the firm carried on a banking transaction intermediation activity that encouraged it to advise SCPIs bought on credit, a configuration in which the distributor’s interest structurally prevails over the client’s.

On the retrocessions paid by asset management companies to fund distributors, the AMF’s inspections brought out several cases where the management company was unable to prove that the distributor had improved the service provided to the client, a condition set in particular by Article 24 of the AIFM delegated regulation for the payment of retrocessions to be lawful. Several disciplinary sanctions were imposed by the AMF’s sanctions committee in 2025 on this theme.

Finally, the ACPR brought to light, at an intermediary marketing life insurance and pension contracts online, cascading failures: deficient target market control, incomplete pre-contractual information on fees and performance, insufficient determination of the client’s level of knowledge and capacity to bear losses, an arbitrage mandate that did not allow an allocation consistent with the client’s needs, and a total absence of a procedure for preventing conflicts of interest.

What Do These Findings Mean for Savers?

One can welcome the supervisory work, while regretting at the same time that the report remains, by its nature, silent on the question that first interests the savers concerned: do these documented failings give rise to a right to compensation? The answer is yes, but it requires action on the civil front, which the authorities do not cover.

The findings made by the regulators (hidden fees, advice unsuited to the client’s profile, unmanaged conflicts of interest, deficient pre-contractual information) correspond to failings that the civil courts regularly sanction on the basis of the professional’s duty to inform and advise: liability of the financial investment adviser, broker or insurer, loss of the chance not to contract or to invest better, or even reimbursement of fees unduly charged. A saver who discovers that his life insurance contract was invested in the most expensive units of a fund when an identical cheaper unit existed, or that his adviser failed to mention the commissions received from third parties, has serious arguments, all the more serious because the regulator has specifically identified these practices as contrary to clients’ interests.

The practical difficulty is evidentiary: these failings are buried in technical documents (suitability statements, management reports, distribution agreements) that the client cannot always read. It is a task of legal and financial analysis of the file, and this is precisely where specialised support makes the difference.

Which Reforms Will Strengthen the Protection of Savers?

What Will the Retail Investment Strategy and Its “Value for Money” Change?

According to the report, 2025 was the culmination of the negotiations on the European Retail Investment Strategy (RIS), a broad reform of the conduct and disclosure rules contained in the MiFID II and IDD directives and in the PRIIPs regulation, proposed by the European Commission in May 2023. The political agreement of 18 December 2025 marks a significant step forward, in particular on the “value for money” component: investment services providers will have to identify and quantify all the costs and fees of the products they design or advise on, then assess whether they are justified and proportionate by comparison with similar products. Failing that, their marketing will be prohibited. For life insurance, the mechanism is almost identical, peer comparison being replaced by benchmarks developed by the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority (EIOPA) or, where appropriate, by national benchmarks.

The suitability test will be supplemented to take account of clients’ need for diversification, cost information will be streamlined through harmonised formats, and distributors will have to ensure that any inducement received provides a tangible benefit to the client, with clear and separate disclosure of its amount.

The ambition is clear, and one may question the timetable: given the two-year transposition period, the amended texts are expected to apply by 2028-2029. Until then, savers will continue to pay fees whose justification will be checked only after the event, inspection by inspection. Yet the practices documented in the 2025 report (clean shares ignored, unjustified retrocessions) show that the problem is current, not prospective. For today’s cases, it is existing law (duty to advise, information obligation, management of conflicts of interest) that remains the working tool of victims and their advisers.

Sustainability Preferences: Why Does Advice Remain Deficient?

Since 2022, European regulation (MiFID II and IDD) has required clients’ sustainability preferences to be collected when giving investment advice, in addition to the traditional criteria (experience, financial situation, risk tolerance). The report finds that implementation often remains insufficient: complex concepts, non-compliant advice processes, clients rarely able to express detailed preferences. In November 2025, the ACPR and the AMF published a joint approach to support life insurance and investment advice professionals, with suitable assessment tools and a clarification of obligations. For savers interested in responsible investment, this is a development to follow: a botched sustainability questionnaire also means potentially unsuitable advice.

Structured Products: Why Are Regulators Looking So Closely at Them?

Structured products (those formula-based investments whose return depends on market scenarios) are enjoying strong commercial momentum among individuals. Under the aegis of the Joint Unit, work launched at the beginning of 2024 led to a market mapping published in April 2025, then to a new phase of study on the distribution, fees and performance of these products: a questionnaire sent in September to representative issuers, interviews, and a second part devoted to distribution (compliance with target markets, product governance, suitability of advice). A summary of the main findings will be published during the second quarter of 2026. Needless to say, the subject is sensitive: the complexity of these products, their opaque fee structure and their distribution via intermediation platforms concentrate precisely the risks of poor advice documented by the 2025 inspections.

Accessibility Directive: What New Obligations Since June 2025?

Lastly, it is worth noting the gradual application of the European Accessibility Directive (Directive (EU) 2019/882 of 17 April 2019), transposed in particular into the Consumer Code (code de la consommation) and the Monetary and Financial Code. Since 28 June 2025, the information provided to customers of banking and financial services (consumer credit, mortgage credit, payment accounts, electronic money, investment services) must be understandable, that is, written in plain language not exceeding level B2 of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. A first assessment of the application of these rules was carried out in early 2026. In time, this readability requirement could weigh in the assessment of the duty to inform: contractual documentation that is incomprehensible to its recipient is documentation that informs badly.

How Can You Protect Yourself in Practice?

From the 2025 report, savers can draw a short list of practical reflexes. Before paying anything to an intermediary who approaches you: check the blacklists on ABE Infoservice and make sure the professional is properly registered (official registers of financial agents and insurance intermediaries). Be systematically wary of promises of high, risk-free returns, of “hot tips” circulating on WhatsApp or through influencers, and of anyone presenting themselves as an agent of the AMF, the ACPR or the Banque de France who has come to help you recover lost funds: the report confirms that “the AMF does not contact savers on its own initiative by telephone or private messaging”. If in doubt, 34 14 puts you through to the authorities’ joint platform.

And if the damage is done, do not stay alone in dealing with your bank: unauthorised payment transactions are subject to a protective reimbursement regime, breaches of the duty to advise can be pleaded, and the way you word your dispute and your complaint conditions what follows. Before any written exchange with the bank or the investigators, read our guide: Bank Fraud: What to Say and Not to Say to Your Bank and in Your Complaint.

Conclusion

The 2025 annual report of the ACPR-AMF Joint Unit documents, with figures to back it up, two realities that the firm observes daily in its cases. The first: financial scams are a mass, industrialised phenomenon, which spares no profile and goes as far as impersonating the regulators themselves. The second: failings are not the monopoly of fraudsters. Among regulated professionals too, the inspections reveal hidden fees, advice steered by the distributor’s remuneration and unmanaged conflicts of interest.

Prevention is progressing and European reform is moving forward, but neither compensates the victims of yesterday and today. For them, the lever remains judicial: the regime for unauthorised transactions, the duty to inform and advise, the liability of intermediaries. Far from being mere statistics, the Joint Unit’s official findings provide context that strengthens these actions. Whether you are the victim of a scam or of defective advice, or a saver faced with fees that nothing justifies, each case deserves a precise analysis of responsibilities, and the sooner the better.

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