The Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre is an extremely busy place. Last year the centre located near downtown North Bay received more than 46,000 fraud reports from Canadian consumers and businesses.
The Anti-Fraud Centre kicked off its month-long national prevention campaign today at the North Bay facility.
"Our key goals are to get individuals to recognize that fraudsters are using text messages, emails, internet, social networking sites to try and defraud Canadians," said Jeff Thomson, an RCMP Analyst at the CAFC.
"Reject, hang up, delete, don't respond to them and then report. If you are not reporting we don't know what is happening and that is really a key piece in reducing fraud."
North Bay Police Chief Scott Tod was in attendance to the campaign launch. He says locally the Anti-Fraud Centre has been a very useful partnership.
"One of the great aspects of the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre is its reputation worldwide in collecting information and providing intelligence back to police services so that we can identify victims and through the victims identify criminals who have targeted them," said Tod.
The police and Anti-Fraud Centre worked together recently to put a stop to a romance scandal.
"Recently we had a romance scandal involving a local citizen where that citizen was asked to use cryptocurrency as a payment in order to support the person they emotionally felt attached to and they used cryptocurrency to transfer a large sum of money and it was reported through the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre<," said Tod.
"We were working with them and a number of other policing partners to work on that investigation."
Thomson says extortion tactics led the way in 2019.
"The biggest change I have seen is the use of extortion as a tactic," said Thomson.
"So when I started here they were trying to trick people saying they won a prize, or they owe taxes that have to be paid right away. Today you are told you owe taxes and told you are going to be arrested, reported and fined if you don't pay right away so it is pure extortion."
While March is considered month where the CACF pushes their message, Thomson insists it has to be a year-long initiative.
"Fraud prevention is not just a one-month thing, it is year-round, you have to continually talk about fraud," said Thomson.
Because of that, the Anti-Fraud Centre conducts as many as 200 Fraud Awareness presentations across the country.
