The Paris prosecutor's office said it was investigating "massive fraud" across France by people falsely claiming temporary wage assistance for employees laid off during the coronavirus lockdown.
As the crisis hit, the French government quickly introduced a system to pay around 84% of net salary for people no longer able to work.
Thousands of firms applied for the payments, allowing millions of people to avoid a sudden drop in revenue - in the first month alone the programme paid out some €24 billion.
But officials soon began noticing suspicious similarities in some applications, in many cases by people who surreptitiously used the tax registration numbers of firms that had not applied for the funds. "More than 1,740 fraudulent operations