Definition
A few weeks after declaring your activity, an envelope arrives. Tricolour letterhead, administrative layout, your SIREN number, your address, your activity code: all of it correct.
At the bottom of the page, an amount, an IBAN, a return deadline.
It is the first letter since your registration to ask you for money, and it looks exactly like the ones you have already received.
A fraudulent register letter is a mailing sent by a private company that imitates the look of an official document in order to sell entry in a directory with no legal value.
The details it shows are accurate because they are public: they come from the National business register, the RNE, and from the Sirene directory, both freely searchable by anyone.
No public body asks by post for payment to be listed on a register: your business is registered by the sole fact of the formality filed with the One-stop shop, and nothing is added afterwards.
The signs that never lie
The name of the register comes first.
It looks like an official title without ever being one: the public databases can be counted on one hand, chiefly the RNE held by INPI, the national industrial property institute, and the Sirene directory held by INSEE, the national statistics office.
Any wording that blends the two, or adds "of the self-employed", "European" or "professional", points to a private database nobody consults.
The payment method comes next.
What a micro-entrepreneur genuinely owes is settled online, from an URSSAF account or a professional tax account: a company IBAN, sometimes foreign, printed on a form to be signed and returned, comes from no administration.
The small print at the foot of the page comes last: "commercial offer", "non-contractual proposal", "this document is not an invoice".
It is there to make the mailing lawful, and it protects you.
As long as nothing is signed or paid, such a letter creates no debt, whereas a returned order form moves the discussion onto contractual ground.
These mailings arrive because your Business address appears in plain sight in open data, along with your name and your creation date.
INSEE lets you request non-disclosure status through its online service, but the request does not claw back the copies already harvested by private directories.
What you actually pay, and to whom
Julien repairs bicycles, a craftsperson providing services, in his second year of activity and outside Alsace-Moselle.
On 3,000 € collected during the quarter, his declaration to URSSAF applies the 2026 rates: 21.2% of social contributions, 0.3% of CFP, the vocational training contribution, and 0.48% of the chamber of trades levy.
That is 21.98% in total, which comes to 659.40 € debited from his account without any envelope asking for it.
That chamber levy was not due in his first year, and an exemption threshold of 5,000 € of turnover spares the smallest in 2026: which year's turnover that threshold is compared with appears in your URSSAF account, since official texts do not all word it the same way.
What remains is income tax, which follows its own calendar, and the CFE, the business property tax, whose balance falls due on 15 December.
In 2026 the CFE notice is entirely paperless: it is consulted in the professional account on impots.gouv.fr and is no longer posted. A "tax notice" received on paper with a payment slip therefore cannot be one.
The flip side is that no envelope will remind you of that deadline: creating the professional account is a mandatory first step, and a notice nobody goes to read ends in a surcharge.
The most effective letter is not the one that threatens, it is the one selling a real service you have no need for.
The most common variant among freelancers: an offer to obtain a VAT number for a fee.
Getting an EU VAT number is entirely free of charge, on request to your service des impôts des entreprises (business tax office) through the secure messaging of your professional account, as the DGFiP, the public finances directorate, confirms.
Paying once mostly puts you on a list: the reminders then come back every year.
Fraud, commercial offer and genuine mail
Three envelopes look alike and call for different reactions.
Genuine administrative mail informs you: INSEE notifies your numbers, URSSAF opens your contributor account and sends your attestation d'affiliation (proof of registration) several weeks after the declaration.
None of them encloses a payment slip.
The disguised commercial offer is lawful in its form: the service sold exists, the required wording sits somewhere on the page, and it is your signature that binds you.
A refund is never guaranteed once the transfer has gone, it is negotiated.
Outright fraud, finally, usurps a public logo or plainly presents itself as an administration: return nothing, keep the letter and the envelope, report it to the fraud authority on SignalConso, then file a complaint if money has already left your account.
Frequently asked questions
I paid: can I get my money back?
Write to the company first, by registered post, asking for a refund and the cancellation of any renewal.
Then dispute the debit with your bank, within the time limits set by your account agreement. Finally report the mailing, since it is the build-up of reports that triggers enforcement.
The letter threatens to strike off my business: can it?
No. No private company can erase a registration: Deregistration is an administrative procedure, started by you or by the competent body, never by a directory seller.
The threat exists only to make you pay quickly, before you check anything.
How do I check that a letter really comes from a public body?
By following no link and no phone number printed on the letter itself.
Log in to your professional account on impots.gouv.fr and to your URSSAF account: anything genuinely owed appears there. If the demand shows up in neither space, it does not exist.
Why do these letters arrive so soon after registration?
Because new registrations are published as open data, with the name, the address and the activity.
Companies harvest them weekly and post immediately, betting on the first months, when you do not yet know which letters are normal.