We live in a golden age for fraud artists. Scams have become a relentless daily phenomenon. I receive a constant string of calls, emails and texts from fake employers, fraudulent courier services and strangely persistent duct cleaners.
The financial toll has grown rapidly: in 2022, the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre received fraud and cybercrime reports totalling $530 million in victim losses, compared to $379 million the year before and $165 million the year before that. Law enforcement believe those are just a fraction of total losses; fraud is a drastically under-reported crime.
In general, the RCMP is ill-equipped to stop this criminal activity, most of which originates overseas. But for a brief period starting in 2018, the force staffed up, mobilized and launched one of the most significant anti-fraud investigations in Canadian history. Its goal was to stop a single large-scale fraud operation: the CRA scam, whose perpetrators tricked targets into believing they owed unpaid taxes, and who are alleged to have called every phone number in Canada.
In a new longform feature for Maclean’s, the reporter Sarah Trelevean chronicles the details of this investigation and then describes how, after stacking up a handful of victories, the effort was dismantled, leaving weary Canadians to once again fend for themselves.
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—Sarah Fulford, editor-in-chief, Maclean’s
