It’s a classic as the end-of-year holidays approach: when everyone is booking their often overpriced train tickets, scams abound. A fake email from SNCF, particularly well done, has already deceived many Internet users.
It is a real scourge, which pushes us to be constantly on our guard, to be suspicious of the slightest email that is “too good to be true”. Throughout the year, and even more so during major promotional periods such as sales or Black Friday, our inboxes are teeming with newsletters and other exceptional offers promising to save us a lot of money: but among them, there are often false promotions, which aim to extract personal or banking information from us.
Perfectly imitating our favorite brands and websites, these scams are improving day by day to fool even the most seasoned among us. Moreover, almost no merchant site is spared from these scam attempts which usurp their identity to attack their customers’ wallets. And of course, the SNCF is one of them. The French railway company is regularly the subject of phishing attempts in its name, which offer significant discounts in the run-up to the summer holidays or Christmas holidays in particular. And at the end of 2025, do it again.
A false offer in fact promises an Avantage card, the famous SNCF pass which allows you to obtain reductions on all journeys during the year, at an unbeatable price: 2.45 euros instead of 49 euros, a reduction of 95% in the price! On the Reddit forum, dozens of Internet users say they have been fooled, as the email received and the URL to which it links are faithful to those of the SNCF itself: “The site is really well done and similar to the official one”; “I had no doubts about the email”; “I almost fell for it, even the email is really well done”wrote users of the platform.
If this scam can trap even the most informed, it is because it is particularly well thought out. And above all, some of the usual warning flags are absent: most of the time, the scams are not nominative, so that they can be distributed to as many potential victims as possible. In this fake SNCF promo scam, the criminals use stolen data to address people directly, with their first and last name, which tends to inspire confidence. Furthermore, you can often spot a phishing attempt thanks to a strange email address, which has nothing to do with the sender it is impersonating. Here, the emails used are sometimes very similar to the real addresses of the railway company, except for a hyphen. Even the most vigilant can make a mistake!
As a reminder, SNCF has not offered a discount on its Avantage card since the start of the 2024 school year: all emails received since then are therefore fraud. On its site, the company warns of the numerous phishing attempts to which it is subject, and lists the email addresses that it officially uses, namely: @mail.sncfconnect.com, @mail.sncf-connect.com, @info.sncf.com, or @connect.sncf. Be alert for any misplaced dots or dashes, which may indicate a fake sender.
