With the tax season again upon us, police in St. Albert, Alberta and across the country are warning residents to be wary of scammers.
People in this city and elsewhere are being targeted with an extortion scam in which a caller claims to be a police officer from the Canadian Revenue Agency, saying the person owes money and will be arrested if they don’t pay immediately.
In a joint media release, the National RCMP media relations department and CRA said taxpayers are often threatened with fines or jail time if they do not immediately send money through a wire transfer service or provide personal banking information.
“The RCMP works every day to track down fraudsters and bring them to justice, but raising awareness about fraud is also important as it is one of the most effective ways of protecting Canadians from scammers,” said assistant commissioner Todd Shean, who leads the RCMP’s federal policing special services.
Cpl. Laurel Kading with the St. Albert RCMP said this kind of call is prolific right now, and said police would never be involved in tax collection unless a judge issued an arrest warrant – but typically an extensive court process would precede this.
“They would never cold call someone and threaten them like this,” she said.
Daniel Williams, a senior fraud specialist with the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, said while this scam seems more likely to happen during tax time, there’s actually a steady flow of these calls going out to Canadians throughout the year.
Of the 57,000 reports made to the centre, roughly a third are a result of extortion attempts like this one.
“It’s massive. Last year, we had over 18,000 complaints on extortion scams, and the vast majority were CRA extortion scams,” he said.
Williams said the good news is that Canadians appear to be getting the message – most of those reports are from people who recognized the phone call as a scam. Only about 1,000 of those reports are from people who lost money, compared to other scams were roughly two thirds of the report are from people who lost money.
This scam has supplanted another form of CRA scam in popularity, in which a victim gets an official-looking email indicating the recipient will get a tax return if they just click the link and enter their banking information.
He said the centre’s information indicates this particular scam originates from illegal call centres in India, as at first it was primarily people of South Asian descent reporting these calls and the callers would often offer to speak in Urdu, Punjabi or Hindi.
“They’ve realized they can get money from the general population as well, and they’ve expanded to reach anybody,” he said.
That reach has expanded will into St. Albert, with residents for the city and surrounding communities reporting on several social media sites they have received these calls.
One woman reported to the St. Albert Gazette last year she had been taken in by this scam, losing $7,000 before she realized she had been had.
Williams said the first thing people should do if they have lost money is phone the wire-transfer provider to see if they can cancel the payment, then phone the local police detachment to report the fraud.
For more information visit the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre at www.antifraudcentre-centreantifraude.ca or the CRA website at www.cra-arc.gc.ca.
