French lender Crédit Mutuel Arkéa said on Thursday that hackers had stolen around €100 million ($112.61 million) from the bank in a cyberattack, in a rare case of cybercriminals successfully stealing from a mainstream financial institution.
The bank said it was working to try to recover the money, but could not yet say how much it would be able to get back. The attack was made public on Wednesday, and French prosecutors have opened an investigation.
The attackers used an account belonging to Crédit Mutuel Arkéa to carry out fraudulent transactions to other banks, the lender said in a statement. The stolen funds were not in the form of cryptocurrency, the bank said, but could have been converted into crypto after being taken.
According to Le Monde, the hackers compromised the computer of a third party authorised to carry out transactions on the bank’s behalf, giving them deep access to its systems. They reached the bank’s equity capital and siphoned off more than €100 million, which was then converted into cryptocurrencies and spread across several exchange platforms. The American platform Kraken sounded the alarm on Monday after receiving unusually large transfers from a European bank and blocked transactions in progress.
Crédit Mutuel Arkéa temporarily suspended some transactions as a precaution, causing delays to some transfers, but said customer assets were not affected. No customers were impacted by the attack, and the bank is the sole victim: the theft is equivalent to about a quarter of its net profit, with the bank posting €430 million in annual profits.
A spokesperson rejected media reports that the bank’s online banking subsidiary Fortuneo was the entry point for the attack, saying that neither the division nor its customers’ accounts were involved. The spokesperson declined to identify the third-party service provider whose platform was used in the attack, and said the bank had informed the European Central Bank, French banking supervisors and prosecutors.
The Paris prosecutor’s office said its cybercrime unit received a complaint from Crédit Mutuel Arkéa on Wednesday and immediately opened an investigation, led by France’s cybercrime police, into an organised attack on an automated data processing system.
The heist follows the theft last week of $6.3 billion in cryptocurrency from the Binance exchange, and a wave of cyberattacks targeting internet-connected fridges in Europe. The Binance hack has been attributed by experts and US authorities to North Korea, but it is still too early to identify those responsible for the Arkéa attack, and the cryptocurrency researcher ZachXBT, who first spotted the suspicious movements, has said the operation did not originate from North Korea.
Rafay Baloch, chief executive of cybersecurity firm RedSecLabs, said the Crédit Mutuel attack was unprecedented in Europe.
Brittany-based Crédit Mutuel Arkéa is a French co-operative banking group with more than 5.8 million customers and €211.5 billion in assets.
Sources: Reuters — French bank Credit Mutuel Arkea says €100 million missing after cyberattack (https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/french-bank-credit-mutuel-arkea-says-100-million-missing-after-cyberattack-2026-11-05/); Le Monde — European banks wake up to scale of vulnerability after cyberattack on French bank (https://www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/article/2026/11/05/european-banks-wake-up-to-scale-of-vulnerability-after-cyberattack-on-french-bank_6772537_19.html)
