SIV Breach: 3,270 Vehicle Titles Generated Behind the Doubs Garage’s Back
On the line, the phrase lands like a slap: “You have registered a stolen vehicle.” It’s a gendarme from the north of France speaking; a car used in a robbery has just been traced to a small shop in Novillars, near Besançon, in the Doubs. Sandrine Tissot and her son Quentin Masson are stunned: their family workshop, opened in 2012, had never laid eyes on this vehicle. And yet, their access to the SIV system was used to issue hundreds of fraudulent vehicle registrations in their name. It’s through that phone call that they discover their garage has been “hacked” and that the tax man at the end of the chain is demanding nearly €176,000 in taxes they swear they never collected.
On October 3, 2024, hackers seized their SIV credentials, quietly added a second access key to their digital certificate, and for several weeks set to work generating registrations—often at night. The Select Automobiles shop, which normally processes only a few hundred car titles a year, ends up tied to roughly 3,270 titles, for a bill of €175,799. Mother and son refuse to pay, insist they never issued these documents, and decide to sue the State in administrative court. Because, month after month, Sandrine Tissot and Quentin Masson uncover that they are not an isolated case, but rather a symbol of a broader SIV hack that puts dozens of small garages on the hot seat.
On November 28, 2024, Select Automobiles filed a complaint. In an email dated January 27, 2025, investigators said they had identified “two individuals likely to be the perpetrators, one located in the south of France and the other in the Paris region.” The hope doesn’t last long: on September 5, 2025, the Besançon district court dismisses the case, saying there were not enough elements “to constitute the offense, and for criminal prosecutions to be brought.” On the tax side, the machine keeps turning. A month after the cascade of fake registrations, the administration notified them of a debt of €175,799, later rising to €185,000 in January 2026 with penalties. “In January 2026, they demanded €185,000 with penalties! It looked so huge. We thought it wasn’t possible,” explains the young mechanic, while his mother sums up their state of mind in one line: “We were at the end of our rope.”
Hacked Garages, FNA on Alert and State Pressure Around the SIV
Seeking answers, Sandrine Tissot and Quentin Masson discover they are not alone. In a WhatsApp group gathering victims, they see screengrabs of towering debts: more than €762,496 claimed from a garage in Guadeloupe, €599,455 in Calvados, €331,570 in the Vendée, €282,986 in the Drôme. The Fédération Nationale de l’Automobile (FNA) has already recorded at least fifty garages among its members affected, with a global damage exceeding three million euros. “But there are more than that—there are several operating methods, several kinds of hackers, and it continues,” asserts Murielle Gautron, who is assisting several files, including in Vendée. According to the FNA, the criminals exploit loopholes in the SIV to intrude into real garages and issue “in a matter of hours, and often at night, thousands of registrations,” generating colossal tax debts for professionals who never requested them. “The first cases were documented in 2025,” Gautron recalls. “Many went to court and were recognized as victims, but the debt remains active. The courts pass the buck back and forth. There is, paradoxically, a flaw in the system.” For her, “We’re facing a big machine that doesn’t work the way it should. On all sites there are security codes, alert messages when there’s abnormal activity. But this platform isn’t secure. And the tragedy is that if you typically issue 100 registrations a year, you could do 1,000 in one night or over a weekend, with no block!” This concern is also raised in the National Assembly, where the deputy Virginie Duby-Muller denounced the possibility of generating “thousands of registrations […] in just a few hours, without any alert or automatic block.”
In official responses, the Interior Ministry acknowledges a “progressive sophistication of fraud schemes,” moving from petty crime to organized networks, while the Cour des Comptes has highlighted an even broader fraud with “fictitious garages” registering nearly a million vehicles between 2022 and 2024, for more than €550 million in lost revenue. To regain control, a government plan to combat registration fraud was launched in May 2025, and “a new, more ambitious action plan to fight registration fraud is under way to secure the issuance of registration certificates,” the ministry notes. On the ground, the Doubs prefect, Rémi Bastille, says he is monitoring cases like Novillars closely: “Select Automobiles was, sadly, among the first in France to be affected, with fraud on this scale,” he emphasizes, adding that “it’s the tax administration itself that now asks garages that were victimized and who were wrongly charged with titles they did not issue to file an appeal to extend collection deadlines” and that “We are confronted daily with registration frauds, and we file several reports to the justice system each week.” Sandrine Tissot and Quentin Masson have indeed taken their case to the Administrative Court of Toulouse, seeking cancellation of their debt and €20,000 in compensation for financial and commercial damages, but the outcome remains uncertain; they sum it up bluntly: “We’re fighting the State. They need to get their money back, and they’ll go to the end. But we can’t pay. The day we have to pay, we close.” Beginning October 1, 2026, only professionals who can prove at least 200 registrations per year will keep access to the software; a measure deemed “drastic” and “unfair” by the FNA, even as the Novillars garage maintains its stance: “Ultimately, it’s up to them to fix their system.”
