By Marianne Lassonde
Special to The Record
Much like traditional offices, fraudulent call centres had to shut down their offices between March and June of 2020. This resulted in less landline phones scams and allowed for the development of more advanced online scams adapted to pandemic demands.
“What you see is more prevalence of phishing, online scams, merchandise scams,” said Jeff Thomson, media relations for the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre.
“Everyone was hopping online to buy face masks – a lot of scams were playing on the pandemic.”
Still, phone scams remain one of the most common solicitation methods. According to him, there were a total of 16,842 victims of phone scams throughout Canada in 2020, making this method the most successful method of fraud.
