Canada warns refugees, immigrants about phone extortion scams

By Ethan Lou
TORONTO, April 5 (Reuters) - Telephone scammers have begun
to target refugees in Canada with extortion schemes by posing as
government employees and threatening them with arrest or
deportation unless they immediately wire money, Canadian
authorities said.
With complaints to Canada's government surging, law
enforcement officials last week warned that the scammers were
taking aim at immigrants and refugees.
Complaints to the Canadian government about the extortion
scams last year reached more than 15,000, 10 times higher than
in 2014, and at least 5,200 complaints already have been lodged
this year, Canada's Anti-Fraud Centre said on Monday.
The Liberal government has taken in some 25,000 Syrian
refugees since taking power in November, and Immigration
Minister John McCallum last week said Canada would accept 10,000
more.
The warning by Canada's Competition Bureau did not specify
how scammers are targeting refugees and immigrants. Marie-France
Faucher, a spokeswoman for the law enforcement agency, said the
warning was issued mainly due to the "arrival of a number of new
immigrants and refugees to Canada over the past year."
Daniel Williams, a senior fraud specialist with Canada's
Anti-Fraud Centre, said the agency started receiving complaints
about such scams in late 2013. The scammers initially looked
through phonebooks and targeted people with south Asian names,
operating on the assumption they were new to the country, but
have become more indiscriminate and expanded to include other
groups, Williams said.
Williams said such scams involve fraudsters demanding money
to resolve what they claimed were tax or immigration issues and
threatening victims with jail or fines.
"And if you're foreign-born, your passport will be revoked,
your citizenship will be revoked, you'll be deported," Williams
said, explaining what the scam victims were told.
Government data showed that 1,111 victims of phone scams of
all kinds have lost more than C$3.5 million ($2.68 million)
since 2014. But the actual amount of money lost to phone scams
remained unknown. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police said only
about 5 percent of victims report these scams to authorities.