There is no shortage of scams and fraud artists trying to take people’s money. If it looks or sounds fishy, it probably is.
Fraudsters are at it again, trying to scam people out of their money, and some appear to be taking aim at Oliver residents.
In the last few weeks several people in town have been targeted by the so-called “tax scam,” where someone claiming to be from the Canada Revenue Agency calls claiming to want money for unpaid taxes.
Marion Soames is one Oliver resident who has dealt with the tax scam firsthand.
According to Soames, last week she came home to find a message on her answering machine: it was hard to understand, but whoever left it mentioned the Canada Revenue Agency and asked her to call them.
When she called the Alberta number back, a man, who Soames said had an accent she couldn’t place, told her she owed $35,000.
The man didn’t give her his name, but Soames said he was aggressive with her, and threatened that the magistrate would take her to court if she didn’t pay up.
Luckily, Soames wasn’t at all convinced, so she hung up and reported the call to the RCMP.
“I knew it was a scam because that’s not the way government works,” she said in an interview April 1.
“If anybody knows Revenue Canada they do everything by mail, they don’t do things by phone,” she said, adding that a big warning sign was the fact that the person had to ask her name: something the government would never do.
On its website, the Canada Revenue Agency notes that calls from people claiming to represent the CRA are on the rise, and warns people to beware, as the fraudulent calls can result in identity theft or lost money.
Numbers from the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre show that scammers ripped off almost 14,000 Canadians in 2015, stealing more than $61 million dollars in the process.
Rick Dellebuur is a former RCMP sergeant working for Crime Stoppers in the Okanagan-Similkameen. He says phone and Internet fraud can be incredibly hard for the RCMP to stop, so citizens need to keep their guard up and know how to protect themselves from getting scammed.
Dellebuur explained that the nature of many scams mean the RCMP doesn’t “have the resources and manpower to track a lot of this stuff down, because a lot of it is coming out of other countries.”
Emails sent from fraudsters can come from anywhere in the world, and they are often bounced around the globe before arriving in a potential victim’s inbox, effectively masking their original location.
Even when the RCMP manage to locate the computer that a scam email was sent from (often somewhere far outside their jurisdiction) they still have to find the person who used that computer.
Phone calls coming from random locations can also be difficult to track, and present many of the same problems.
“In a lot of ways our laws just haven’t kept up with the advancements in technology”
“We don’t have much luck in investigating these things, and that’s why education and prevention are our best attack for this thing,” Dellebuur said.
Education is doubly important, Dellebuur said, because scammers play to people’s worst fears, and their claims can often be scary and hard to ignore.
The tax scam that Soames was targeted with can be particularly terrifying for seniors and people who don’t get in trouble with the government or debt collectors.
“They don’t want any trouble with the government: they paid their taxes all their life, and if they need $600 they’re going to send $600,” Dellebuur said.
Other common scams are the “grandparent scam,” where someone calls asking simply for “grandma” or “grandpa,” and after convincing their victim they are their grandchild they ask them to send money to help them out of trouble.
Also popular in the area is the “romance scam,” where fraudsters target people through online dating sites. After building up trust they will ask for money to come visit, but will claim something happened to keep them from coming. This can happen several times before the victim clues in that their so-called lover is never showing up.
Dellebuur says the best way to defend against scammers is to “listen to your Spidey senses: if it sounds fishy, looks fishy, tastes fishy, then it most likely is fishy.”
Simply doing a gut check during your first interaction with a suspicious person—through phone or email—is often enough to stop something bad from happening.
That is exactly what Soames said she did when she was faced with a potential scammer, and she said she feels proud that she managed to avoid being duped.
Her advice for others put in a similar situation is simple.
“Just go with your gut feeling: if you don’t think it’s right it probably isn’t,” she said.
By Trevor Nichols
