Refugees being targeted by telephone scammers

“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,” wrote Ethan Lou for The Globe and Mail on April 5, 2016.

Lou continued, “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.”

Read the full article here.

Raymond Matt, CFP, CLU, TEP, CHS

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