A new study suggests there's been an uptick in phone scams in Canada, such as those involving federal agency impersonation or air duct cleaning.
A report released Tuesday by Seattle-based Hiya, which aims to protect phone users from spam through its voice security platform, found 6.3 per cent of unwanted calls received by Canadians in the first three months of the year were considered fraud, compared with 5.9 per cent in the final quarter of 2022.
But Canadians were on the other end of a much higher proportion of fraud-related calls. Spam calls made up 18.3 per cent of calls from unrecognized numbers in Canada, the report found, with 6.3 per cent of them considered fraud. In the U.S., one-quarter of calls from non-contacts in the first quarter were spam, but fraud calls accounted for just 0.7 per cent of them.
Like other countries studied, some of the top scams in Canada were related to cryptocurrency trading and those targeting newer immigrants who may be less familiar with the way the government works. The latter included callers impersonating government officials claiming to be from the Canada Border Services Agency or Canada Revenue Agency.
In 2022, the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre received 90,377 fraud reports totalling more than $530 million in losses, according to data published in February. It estimated that just five to 10 per cent of victims file a fraud report with the CAFC.The CAFC said on its website as of March 31, it had received 18,645 reports of fraud totalling $133.7 million in losses this year.Last November, the CRTC hosted a meeting with its counterparts from Australia, Ireland, Hong Kong and the U.S.
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