French Bank Crédit Mutuel Arkéa Confirms Cyberattack: About €100 Million Moved in Fraudulent Transfers, Part of It Frozen
Paris — French cooperative banking group Crédit Mutuel Arkéa confirmed on November 4 that it had suffered a sophisticated external cyberattack in which fraudulent transfers totalling nearly €100 million were carried out. The Paris public prosecutor's office has opened an investigation.
According to AFP, citing the bank, the attackers used an internal account of the banking group to send transfers to banks abroad, then quickly converted the money into cryptocurrencies through specialised platforms. The bank said the attack had been contained, part of the funds had been frozen, and efforts to recover the rest were continuing. French media including Le Monde reported that the attackers entered the bank's systems through the platform of a third-party service provider holding trading authority.
The bank stressed that the incident resulted from a highly professional external intrusion, not from human error inside the institution, and that the customer accounts of its banks and subsidiaries were not touched and customers suffered no losses. It did not confirm the figure of up to €118 million reported by Le Télégramme, saying only that the losses would not affect the group's financial soundness. The group posted a net profit of €230 million in the first half of 2026, has more than 5.8 million members and customers, and holds total assets of about €211.5 billion.
On-chain investigator ZachXBT first disclosed on November 2 that an unnamed EU institution appeared to have lost more than $106 million, later raising the estimate above $133 million and naming Crédit Mutuel Arkéa on November 3. Crypto exchange Kraken detected unusually large transfers the same day, issued an alert and blocked transactions in progress. The identity of the attackers has not been established.
Source: Crédit Mutuel Arkéa
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：布列塔尼互助信贷银行在 Plabennec 的网点，该行隶属法国互助信贷阿凯阿银行集团。照片：Kergourlay，CC BY-SA 4.0，经 Wikimedia Commons。 / Photo: A Crédit Mutuel de Bretagne branch in Plabennec; the bank is part of the Crédit Mutuel Arkéa group. Photo by Kergourlay, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
