A few days ago, Toulouse Football Club alerted professional players on cases of identity theft, taking the example of a former player. “Over the last eighteen months, a malicious individual claiming to be part of the Toulouse Football Club recruitment unit and falsely identifying himself as Nicolas Dieuze, a former player at the club, used a fake Instagram account to connect with players around the world. »
Blackmail, attempted racketeering
A story that dates back almost two years, as Nicolas Dieuze explains: “I was hacked during the certification process of my account. Naively, I responded to an email asking me to carry out certain procedures,” explains the man who is now a sports agent with the French Football Federation. Blackmail, attempted racketeering, the new owner of the @nicodieuze account wants to defraud the former TéFéCé player, without success.
“For a few months, not much happened, then agents who knew me asked me why I was contacting players directly… They found it strange,” continues Nicolas Dieuze, who filed a complaint more one year. The Toulouse club was also alerted by agents, surprised to see the club proceed in this way, the fake Nicolas Dieuze posing as an emissary of TéFéCé and asking the players to advance their travel expenses to come and sign for the Toulouse Football Club. “A fairly light modus operandi because it never happens that a club asks for this,” points out the former professional.
It was ultimately the multiplication of attempts that pushed the Violets to communicate, giving some media coverage to the affair. For the former Toulouse midfielder, who created a new account @nicolasdieuzeofficiel, the objective today is to close the fake account, certified since August 2023. “Especially since the same person hacked my LinkedIn account a month and a half ago, asking me for 15,000 dollars”, points out- he. A post on this same network also allowed him to be contacted by someone from the Meta group to resolve the issue.
If he assures that, in his daily life, this story no longer really harms him, Nicolas Dieuze cannot “be certain that no player has fallen into the trap”. However, the case is not isolated since, this summer, a person posed as the sports coordinator of RC Strasbourg, Kader Mangane, to agents of Venezuelan players.
