“The scheme targets highly vulnerable home-owning seniors and often starts with exploitative, unfair door-to-door sales contracts financed by high-interest loans that are secured with NOSIs or private mortgages.”
These scams often follow a similar pattern: elderly home owners are duped into signing unfair door-to-door home service contracts for products and services they do not need and can’t afford. These are grossly overpriced and provide little or no value. The home owner may be approached by a “groomer,” who makes repeated visits and falsely promises to get them out of these unfair contracts free of charge. They may receive false promises of “rebates” if they sign documents that can pay for “free” renovations. The home owner later discovers a private mortgage has been placed on their home with unfair terms including interest rates as high as 25%. There could also be high brokerage, referral and lenders’ fees, as well as pre-payment of interest for a full one-year term (making the mortgage difficult to discover until it becomes due). Given how unaffordable these are for seniors on modest pensions, they often default on the mortgage payments and are served with legal proceedings to sell or foreclose on their home.
Which seniors are being targeted for fraud in Canada?
An eye-opening link on the huge extent and variety of fraud is available at the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre. It reports that almost 64,000 frauds in 2023 affecting almost 40,000 victims, and almost 11,000 more in the first quarter of 2024 with 7,900 victims. The site lists scores of scams alphabetically, ranging from duct cleaning to fake business proposals, foreign lotteries, holiday scams, initial coin offerings for crypto products (ICOs), sextortion and much more.
The Toronto Police Service (TPS) says these crimes are now so widespread that scams targeted at seniors are now “the crime of the 21st century.” It covers the aforementioned romance and grandparent scams and also warns about home renovation scams, where the “sole intention of the fraudster is to get a signature on a contract, do little, poor or no work and take as much money” as possible.
To avoid being duped, TPS urges seniors to never allow strangers to enter their homes (via internet, phone or door) and take information about them and/or their assets. Read contracts carefully and never sign contracts with any blank lines, as someone may later add clauses that will harm you. Shred bank statements, financial records or receipts with credit-card numbers on them. To report a crime anonymously, call Crime Stoppers at: 1-800-222-8477 (TIPS) or report it online at: www.222tips.com.
GetCyberSafe.ca bills itself as a “national public awareness campaign” to help Canadians protect themselves online. It includes a Get Cyber Safe Checkup created by the Government of Canada. The Get Cyber Safe campaign was launched in 2011 by Public Safety Canada as part of Canada’s National Cyber Security Strategy. According to its media relations, the campaign became the responsibility of the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSE) in 2018 after an update to the National Cyber Security Strategy and the creation of the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security (Cyber Centre) within CSE. It also works closely with Canada’s international Five Eyes partners (U.S., U.K., Australia and New Zealand) on all matters relating to cyber security to help build a global cyber-security culture.
The Cyber Centre says you should have a unique password for every account you have, which can be made easier by using a password manager, an app that stores and manages online credentials as well as generates passwords. It also suggests using sentence-like passphrases, not just passwords. If available, you should use multi-factor authentication app or texts. Check the privacy settings. Usually it’s a feature you can just turn on.
The Cyber Centre also recommends backing up your data at least once a week. It suggests familiarizing yourself with the aforementioned Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre (CAFC), which is a joint project of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), the federal Competition Bureau and the Ontario Provincial Police. The site allows you to browse the major scams in circulation, tips on protecting yourself, what to do if you’re a victim and how to report a fraud.
