Reporting Scams and Frauds

If you have not lost any money and have not provided personal or financial information (relating to a fraud or scam), and you simply want to inform the appropriate organizations, report it to the Canadian Anti-fraud Centre by calling 1-888-495-8501

If you received a fraudulent e-mail soliciting personal or financial information (phishing scam), you should also advise the financial institution or other agency whose name was used.

If you are a victim of fraud or if you unwittingly provided personal or financial information (identity fraud), follow the steps in our Victim Assistance Guide.

If you are a victim of fraud and it is not related to identity fraud, contact the police service of jurisdiction in your area.

Always report fraud to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre at info@antifraudcentre.ca or by dialing 1-888-495-8501 or on-line by visiting the CAFC website.

Growing number of stolen IDs used to get real passports: RCMP

Criminals are increasingly using stolen social insurance numbers and doctored birth certificates to obtain legitimate driver's licences and passports, an internal RCMP report says.

And by leveraging pilfered or forged identity markers into higher-value IDs, criminals can sidestep tough anti-counterfeiting features built into government-issued identity documents, including a pending upgrade of passports with biometric chips.

"Identities are being overtaken, altered or created, facilitating a number of other crimes, including many variations of fraud, typically for financial gain or to conceal a true identity," says the March 2011 report prepared by the RCMP's criminal intelligence division.

It points to a rising use of "breeder" documents -- identity records such as social insurance numbers, birth or citizenship certificates -- that are stolen, tampered with or falsified, then used to sign up for credit cards or valid forms of identity.

The report suggests Ottawa's recent move to stop issuing SIN cards, instead sending the information in a letter, may not hinder identity thieves who skim someone's mail or pick through their garbage looking for the nine-digit number.

The report says the failure of governments to cross-check the authenticity of personal documents used in applications allows fraudsters to stitch together a "synthetic" identity, often combining a stolen social insurance number or altered birth certificate with a made-up name and date of birth.

That means a social insurance number can be successfully paired with an entirely different name on a government application form, since the two are not routinely checked for a match, it says.
And online applications make it easier for criminals to avoid face-to-face interactions when committing identity fraud, the report notes.

Though obtaining credit cards is the number 1 goal for fraudsters, they're also exploiting gaps in the way numerous official identity documents are issued -- or using existing cards with no security features or photo -- to acquire a federal passport or provincial driver's license, according to the RCMP research.

"There are too many ID cards/documents in circulation. More documents lead to more standards, which opens the door to more fraud," the report says, adding organized crime groups seize upon identity-protection shortfalls.

A censored copy of the report obtained by The Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act does not contain statistics on how common the fraud tactic is, but estimates suggest it is growing rapidly along with other forms of identity crime.

Getting the provincial and federal governments on the same page when checking someone's identity is a big undertaking that nonetheless needs tackling, said Lindsay Lee, director of the Canadian Identity Theft Support Centre, which runs a hotline for identity fraud victims.

"There's no unified system for (governments) to check everything across the board. It's really challenging to get everyone in line," she said."It's just a big jumble right now."

Some 17,000 Canadians lost more than $13-million to identity fraud last year, twice the dollar loss reported in 2007, according to figures collected by the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, a federal organization which tracks identity crime.

But the real total is likely higher due to under-reporting, the RCMP report says, citing a 2008 survey by Hamilton's McMaster University that found only 13 per cent of identity fraud cases are reported to police.

Lee said one simple step Ottawa and the provinces could take is to start partly blanking out social insurance numbers in government letters, just as credit card numbers are hidden on receipts.
Having a credit check done at least once a year and keeping an eye out for missing bills are two ways people can protect themselves against the more than two-dozen types of identity crime, she said.
And once bills and government letters have been read? "Shred them."

RCMP Sgt. Luce Normandin is helping draft a national identity crime strategy. She says the plan aims to boost awareness among governments, businesses and Canadians themselves and cut down identity theft rates.

"Hopefully the community as a whole becomes more sensitive to the fact (of ID fraud)," she said.
"We don't feel targeted as much as we maybe sometimes are."


Read more: http://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/growing-number-of-stolen-ids-used-to-get-real-passports-rcmp-1.948404#ixzz2605y7BpC

Ontario private eyes accused of fraud nabbed in Caribbean

Two Canadian private eyes accused of defrauding divorce and business clients have been nabbed by police in the Caribbean where they have been island hopping for three years.

Cullen Johnson is a former aide to a Toronto police chief. Elaine White, his wife and partner in alleged crime, once worked for forensic accountants in Toronto. They are in a Turks and Caicos jail awaiting a hearing Friday.

A Toronto Star investigation in 2009 exposed an unusual scheme: Both were accused by former clients (and later the police) of forging and selling bank records that made clients believe an ex-spouse, friend or employee had millions of dollars stashed offshore. One case involved a group of lottery winning friends led to believe one of their group swindled the others.

Shortly after the pair pleaded not guilty to fraud charges in Newmarket court in late December 2009, they flew south and set up shop in the Bahamas, calling their new private-eye company Internal Affairs Global, boasting a crack investigation squad that could pierce any banking veil.

On Wednesday, immigration agents in the Turks and Caicos arrested Johnson, 64, and White, 69. Police in Ontario say the pair had overstayed their Turks’ visa. A routine check turned up warrants for their arrest filed internationally by the Ontario Provincial Police, stories in the Toronto Star and their Panamanian-based website.

“Our folks are in touch with the authorities in the Turks,” said OPP spokesman Sgt. Peter Leon.
He said the OPP is exploring options to get them back in Ontario. Extradition is one option, but there may be an easier route. “The (Turks government) may deport them. If we know they are coming, we will be waiting for them.”

The Star’s probe of Johnson and White turned up a series of authentic looking bank statements sent to numerous clients for a fee.

In one case, well-respected former Ontario Liberal MPP Eric Cunningham was a target. Cunningham and his wife were in court on divorce proceedings in 2005. In a case that took years, his ex-wife presented banking documents obtained from the detectives that made it look like the former MPP was a wealthy man with assets offshore, an incredible $2.3 million in accounts flung as far as the Cook Islands, Panama, the Bahamas, Hong Kong and the Cayman Islands.

All false, two judges said, vindicating Cunningham. But the case took a financial toll on him as he had to pay lawyers for years to defend his case. His ex-wife’s father funded most of the investigation of Cunningham, but private eyes cooked up the false documents.

In Cunningham’s case and others, the detectives are accused of doing a sort of financial striptease for clients, showing clients (his ex-wife in this case) more and more documents depending on how much they paid in fees. The Holy Grail which clients would finally get (all forged) was the signature card “proving” who had opened the offshore account.

Cunningham said Wednesday he is cautiously pleased. “The wheels of justice grind, but they grind slowly,” said Cunningham, a communications consultant who said he would be happily retired were it not for Internal Affairs.

The Star stories revealed how the Ontario government has little control over the private investigators it licenses. Not much has changed since then, though a top official lost his job.

In another case, four Toronto Catholic School Board employees who were good friends routinely played the same lottery numbers, hoping to make a big score and retire early. One day, one of the four did a random check of the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp. website and learned the group’s ticket had won $5.7 million six months earlier.

Suspicious of the friend who had checked the number at a convenience store, the group hired Internal Affairs. A “banking sweep” turned up records that appeared to show the friend had won, and sent the money offshore to Barbados and Switzerland. The group confronted their friend who said the convenience store owner had told her they did not win
.
An investigation turned out that the store owner was the thief, and he had closed his shop, bought a mansion, a Tim Hortons franchise for his son and several cars. The lottery corporation reimbursed the four friends and the store owner pleaded guilty to fraud.

Johnson and White are also believed by investigators to be behind a series of forged documents that suggest federal minister Julian Fantino, Cunningham, other politicians and a “yellow” journalist at the Star are involved in a bizarre, fictitious financial conspiracy called “Superstar Corruption.”

In a previous interview by email in 2010, Johnson both attacked the Star’s credibility and protested his innocence. In other correspondence, Johnson has mused about his predicament, unable to come home to see family.

“I’ve always liked the Kenny Rogers ballad, ‘The Gambler.’ Good advice. Know when to hold ’em and know when to fold ’em,” Johnson wrote to the Star at one point. He ended on a cheery note. “As they say at McDonald’s, “Have a nice day!”

Nearly half of Canadians report hacker attacks

OTTAWA — Whether it's by viruses, worms or phishing emails and texts, nearly half of all Canadians have been targeted by hackers at some point over the past year, according to a new report from an anti-virus software company.

The 2012 Norton Cyber-crime Report, released Wednesday, says more than 46 per cent of Canadians have re-ported attempts by hackers to try to obtain personal data over the past 12 months.

More than 8.3 million Canadians report they have been victims of cybercrime in the past year and 42 per cent of Canadian adults say they wouldn't know if their computer, tablet or phone was infected with a virus unless it crashed or slowed down dramatically.

Canadian's aren't being singled out, according to the re-port, which collected data from 24 countries.
More than 46 per cent of global respondents also re-ported that hackers had tried to coerce sensitive information from them within the past 12 months.

Despite new anti-virus soft-ware and tougher laws to protect consumers, hackers are becoming more dangerous than ever. According to the Norton study, hackers have started mining social net-works such as Facebook and have added new tools that al-low them to exploit software flaws on phones, tablets and computers in their attempts to scoop up more personal in-formation.
When those high-tech approaches aren't enough, hackers are turning to low-tech methods to implant computers with viruses and other nasty computer pro-grams.

In January, a scam in which callers pretending to be Microsoft employees offered to solve computer problems accounted for 70 per cent of all fraud complaints in Canada, according to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre.

The callers offered to help people clean a virus from their hard drives. In the process, they charged victims as much as $400, collected credit card information and gained access to personal files on the victims' computers.

Hacking accounted for more than $1.4 billion in losses to Canadians over the past 12 months, the study estimates.

Lynn Hargrove, Canadian director of consumer solutions for Symantec Corp., which publishes Norton anti-virus software, said consumers are becoming more savvy at preventing hackers from gaining access to their computers. But hackers are increasingly turning their attention to mo-bile phones and devices, especially as more people use cellular phones for banking and making electronic payments.

"Cyber criminals are looking at new ways to attack, and mobile is a really big platform that we are seeing," she said. "Obviously, that's a place that cyber criminals are going to attack. Cyber criminals are going to go where the biggest bang for their buck is."

Mobile has become the new frontier for hackers eager to collect bank account and credit card data from individuals. According to Norton, as many as 16 per cent of Canadians re-ported falling victim to mobile fraud over the past 12 months. That number could skyrocket as hackers further target mobile devices.

"It's a much different landscape," said Hargrove. "As we are seeing more cybercrime on a mobile de-vice, 54 per cent of Canadians are re-porting that they are accessing the Internet on that device and 74 per cent of Canadians don't have mobile security."

Hargrove said that 59 per cent of survey respondents were unaware that security programs exist for their mobile devices.

The study was released just days after hackers made public person-al information from more than one million iPhone and other Apple de-vices. The hackers claim to have personal information from more than 11 million mobile devices and say they may release more data in the coming weeks.

Last week, another group of hackers publicly released the bank records and personal credit histories of more than a million people. The hackers, who claim the data theft and subsequent posting of the in-formation on the Internet is a form of protest against big business and the banks, have promised that the release was only the first wave of a broader release.

The 2012 Norton Cybercrime Re-port is in its third year of publication. The survey asked questions of 13,018 online respondents from 24 countries, including 500 from Canada. The margin of error for the study results is plus 0.9 per cent at the 95 per cent level of confidence.

CYBERCRIME NUMBERS

Number of reported cybercrime victims in past 12 months
■ 8.3 million (Canada)
■ 556 million (global)
Online adults who have reported experiencing cybercrime
■ 46 per cent (Canada)
■ 46 per cent (global)
Total net costs of cybercrime
■ $1.4 billion (Canada)
■ $110 billion US (global)
Social network users who do not check links before sharing them with others
■ 15 per cent (Canada)
■ 20 per cent (global)
Online adults who don't understand the risk of cybercrime or how to protect themselves online
■ 21 per cent (Canada)
■ 28 per cent (global)

Source: 2012 Norton Cybercrime Report