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Frauds and other scams
Practical tips for recognizing and preventing online and telephone frauds and scams.
Theft and identity theft
Emails, text messages, Internet, telephone, even searching through garbage bins! There’s no limit to what fraudsters will do to steal a person’s identity.
Identity theft consists of appropriating personal information for criminal purposes. A malicious person may use that information to:
- Apply for a loan or a credit card or open a bank account.
- Access a bank account for purposes of stealing or transferring money.
- Make purchases.
- Identify themselves using your name during a police intervention.
- By stealing postal mail, a handbag or a wallet.
- By sifting through garbage bins for bills and bank statements.
- By using phishing techniques by email, text message or telephone.
A trick for recognizing fraud
During an attempted fraud, fraudsters will often demand urgent action or try to establish a relationship of trust and friendship. Governments, financial and banking institutions, and professional service providers never behave in this manner.
Whether via electronic channels (email, Web, text messages) or by telephone, look for the following signs of fraud:
- Non-personalized or generic message
- Request for urgent action
- Spelling or grammatical errors
- Web link with no context or explanation
- Non-secure Web address:
- Absence of the “s” in “https”
- Absence of the lock symbol
- Unusual website appearance
- Call from an unknown number or an unfamiliar area code
- Do not reply to emails, text messages or telephone calls asking you to provide personal or financial information.
- Check your bank statements regularly and report any irregularities.
- Shred documents that contain personal information.
- Empty your mailbox regularly to reduce the risk of mail theft.
Telephone fraud
Phishing consists of stealing someone’s identify in order to defraud them. Here are the most frequent scams:
1. Fraud by false representation
A person calls you or sends you a text message or an email pretending to be from the government or the police. They tell you that your income tax has not been paid or that your file is incomplete. To make you panic, they ask for rapid payment or personal information, threatening you with fines or arrest. They ask you to pay by credit card, debit or via a different method of payment.
2. Tax fraud
The person targeted receives a call from a fake police force informing them that their social insurance card has been compromised. The malicious person asks questions to get banking information, requests that the person make a significant withdrawal of funds, and sends a QR code for a deposit in cryptocurrency. They will go as far as to order a taxi to get to a bitcoin ATM. Throughout the operation, they stay on the phone and give instructions, becoming aggressive if the person targeted hesitates, even threatening to call the police.
3. Debt collection scam
A fake collection agency asks you for a payment to reimburse a fictitious debt. The person on the line may try to apply pressure and get you to act quickly.
4. Grandparent scam
This fraud targets seniors. A malicious person posing as a close family friend in distress (accident, arrest, etc.) requests urgent financial assistance. To lend themselves greater credibility, they may call upon an accomplice pretending to be medical, legal or police department personnel. The person targeted is asked to secretly withdraw money from the bank and give it to a home courier service.
5. Fake contests
A person claiming to be in charge of a contest announces that you have won a prize, but requests that you pay a fee in advance in order to claim it.
6. Bank fraud
A malicious person calls you alleging that your bank cards have been compromised. They then ask you to place your cards and your PIN in an envelope and to leave the envelope in your mailbox, claiming that someone from the police department will come to collect it. The fraudsters then use your PIN to empty your banks accounts.
7. CEO fraud
This fraud targets small to medium-sized businesses. A person posing as a senior management figure asks someone on the team to make an urgent transfer of funds.
- Hang up if you receive an automated message.
- Ignore calls from unknown numbers.
- If a loved one calls you with an urgent request for money, hang up and call the person back. That is an effective way to confirm that the call you received was not fraudulent. Using artificial intelligence (deepfakes), fraudsters can imitate your loved one’s voice.
- Ask personal questions that only the real person would know the answer to.
- Directly contact your loved ones to notify them of any suspicious activity.
- Create a secret password with your loved ones to verify their identity.
- Don’t be afraid to say no, even to a loved one.
How to counter fraud
Never share personal and banking information if you don’t know the person with whom you are communicating. Take the time to validate the information, as fraud specialists will prey on your desire to help a loved one in an emergency situation.
Internet fraud
There are as many ways to use the Internet to defraud people as there are to protect against it.
Cryptocurrency, like bitcoin, is virtual currency. The fraud consists of promising high and quick returns. The person targeted can lose their investment and risk having their personal information stolen.
Because cryptocurrency is difficult to trace, malicious people try to take advantage of the situation to:
- Pose as someone from the government to extort cryptocurrency or create fake cryptocurrency exchange platforms.
- Require payment for an online purchase.
- Incite others to make fraudulent investments with promises of very high rates of return.
A romance scam starts with a contact on a dating website or a social media platform and quickly evolves into a romantic relationship involving the person targeted with the goal of stealing money from them. How does a romance scam unfold’?
- The malicious person creates a false profile and expresses an interest in developing a relationship with the person targeted.
- Before long, the malicious person declares their love, without even having met the other person.
- Once the malicious person gains the other person’s trust, they ask for money, citing an urgent situation (sickness of a family member, job loss, financial problems, plane tickets for a meeting, problems with customs, etc.).
- They may also ask for explicit photos or videos, then extort money in exchange.
- Protect your computer at all times and be vigilant on the Web or when providing personal and banking information online.
- Lock your electronic devices.
- Never share your passwords.
- Protect your computer with anti-virus software, a spyware blocker and a firewall, and update them regularly.
- Regularly delete your browsing history and the cache memory from your computer.
- Never give access to your computer to a person who calls you by surprise.
- Delete suspicious messages and any related attachments, as they may contain a virus.
- Check the legitimacy of a platform by conducting in-depth research.
- Only use secure websites that begin with https://.
- Save all documents related to cryptocurrency transactions.
- Never send money to a person with whom you recently entered into a love relationship if you have never met them in person and never share your personal information with them.
How to safely purchase a used product on the Internet
More and more people are buying used products online via such platforms as Marketplace (Facebook) or Kijiji. Unfortunately, some people view these sites as an opportunity to commit fraud.
To avoid scams, carry out the transaction in a neutral meeting place, i.e., a clearly identified public place, with permanent video surveillance made available to the public by the Service de police of Laval.
Parking lot of the Quartier général du Service de police de Laval
2911 Chomedey, Laval QC
