Mme TP just started panicking (nothing new there....) at having received an sms on her phone this morning indicating that her Carte Vital has expired, and to contact the link indicated on the sms for renewal.
With her in immediate panic mode (as she has a doctor's appointment later this afternoon), I immediately calmed her down, saying that everyone should know that the cards can be renewed at a terminal within most pharmacists, but nevertheless went onto my laptop and did a search for 'arnaque sécurité social carte vital'.
I wasn't surprised at the result. Sure enough it's a scam, and a very widespread one at that. Here's a SAFE link from the Assurance Maladie official site explaining the scam. The give away in the scam sms that it's false is an incorrect ameli e-mail address. Le site officiel de l'Assurance Maladie ameli has the .fr suffix.
Be aware and stay safe! Happy New Year to you all.

There seems to be an amazing amount of scams around so thank you for warning members of this one because I feel sure that many would panic on receiving this type of message.

Rosemary

!! Be sure to block the numbers/senders of such messages on your phone if at all possible. (This is not possible in all cases of course and depends on the nature of the message.)

In addition, this time of year is a good time to clean up your phone.

Get rid of apps you haven't used for a while and restrict those apps you find necessary to what they can actually see about you.

It's a constant battle.

Don't tell me about phones. I hate them. My current one is supposed to be "smart" but it is anything but. We recently had failure of internet and no way to report it to Orange. Of course the mobile was of no use, as usual, because we have no network coverage here. I needed to get online to find the Orange website to report the breakdown so knowing there are no public wifi points near here I drove until I got a couple of bars of signal strength on the phone. Parked up and tried to access the internet on it for the first time. There are a couple of browsers on it but no way to use them. No onscreen keyboard to type in a web address or a search query. Then I discover that there may be a keyboard App? available from the Google "Play" Store but to access it I need to register for an account with Google. Google is the last outfit I want to willingly engage with due to their infamous record of privacy issues and data exploitation. Regardless, without a means of entering the info they want I can't register.
I'm told this is progress.

Agreed. Google and Facebook use/mis-use your information.
The answer is to lie to them.
Don't use your real name; don't tell them where you live and don't give them your date of birth.
They don't give you their details.