Fraud investigators with the city’s police service are utilizing a simple poster campaign to help seniors protect themselves from being scammed.
The idea is to provide seniors with key details about common scams in the hopes extra knowledge will be enough to thwart would-be fraudsters. Posters, commissioned by the Thunder Bay Police Service, have been printed and distributed to various locations seniors frequent. This includes senior living centres and retirement homes.
“The police are not able to stop these guys from contacting our seniors and vulnerable people,” said Det.-Cst. Shawn Comeau. “So, the initiative was to go out and make them aware before they received the calls.”
Before a single poster was distributed to a single senior’s living centre, there was good reason to be optimistic about the campaign as the concept had already been tested.
In the winter of 2022, the Thunder Bay Police Service’s fraud investigators became inundated with bitcoin scams.
Victims were coerced into submitting money into a bitcoin wallet via a bitcoin ATM. Once money was deposited, the chances of a victim ever seeing it again was virtually zero.
“I was sick of getting reports after the fact and not being able to do anything about it,” said Det.-Cst. Comeau. “So, I thought it was time to start focusing more on trying to warn these people.”
Det.-Cst. Comeau learned the city was home to eight bitcoin ATMs. He visited each one and posted a sign warning people if they were being directed to deposit money through the machine, they were likely being scammed. The sign also emphasized that money lost through this type of scam could not be recovered by police.
“And it all but stopped,” he said.
"We were getting waves of them,” added Fraud Unit Det.-Cst. Dave Boer. “Now, we may get the occasional one.”
Not all scams direct would-be victims to a bitcoin machine. While those victims did have a new layer of protection, targets of other kinds of frauds were still vulnerable. Among the most vulnerable are seniors.
This fact, combined with the success of the bitcoin poster campaign, let the Fraud Unit to take the concept to seniors.
Right now, there’s no statistical metric to accurately measure the outcome of this campaign. But the investigators of the fraud unit are convinced it has already been a tremendous success.
“It’s paid for itself already,” said Det.-Cst. Boer. “With the last wave of grandparents scams we just had, we had a lot less victims. Most people were just notifying us that someone had tried to scam them.”
The Grandparent Scam is a relatively common scam. Typically, a would-be victim is contacted by a fraudster pretending to be their grandchild. The scammer tells the victim they’ve been arrested, or detained after a motor vehicle accident, and require money to post bail.
While some stories by the scammer vary, the objective is always to instill panic and a sense of urgency in the target.
This scam hit locals in waves several times in late 2022 and early 2023.
Had the campaign never launched, there’s reason to believe many of those phone calls would have been victims filing a report about the money they had lost through the Grandparents Scam.
March is Fraud Prevention Month. To learn more about some of the more common scams and how you can protect yourself, please visit the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre online at: www.antifraudcentre-centreantifraude.ca.
Police ask that you take time to speak with your more vulnerable family members and friends who may be at a greater risk of being targeted by scammers.