In the last days of April, Ben arrived at an RCMP detachment in rural B.C. with a plan to get back his life savings.
Over the previous 10 months, Ben had shovelled $1.6 million into what he thought was an online Swiss investment platform.
That month, Ben realized he had been conned. The money he thought had gone into stocks had been turned into cryptocurrency and scattered across the world.
It’s a loss that changed his life. He said he suffers from worsened health, sleepless nights and endless shame, which is why the IJF has agreed to not publish his name.
According to Ben, police told him they couldn’t do anything. So he dug into his depleted pockets and hired two private companies that tracks cryptocurrency. One of them gave him a 40-page report, showing his money had gone to accounts in the Bahamas, Paraguay and Bulgaria. The second company found Ben's money had been moved more than 200 times before it landed in those accounts in an apparent attempt to hide the trail.
“I’m not asking them to go over to Bulgaria and arrest these guys,” said Ben, a B.C. businessman.
But he assumed RCMP could at least try to contact police in those countries to get a freeze on his stolen assets, or contact one of the five cryptocurrency exchanges that his money had flowed though.
Instead, Ben said, RCMP told him again there was nothing they could do.
“That’s the thing that’s really difficult,” Ben said. “They won’t even try.”
Ben is not alone.
Across Canada, scammers are stealing billions from Canadians every year, crimes that police are often unable or unwilling to investigate, according to experts and officers interviewed for this story. That, in turn, is pushing victims who have already lost their life savings to spend tens of thousands more on private investigations that bear little chance of getting the money back.
Many fall prey to sophisticated online investment schemes like the one that entrapped Ben, crafted by overseas criminal groups who will spend months bilking cash out of a single victim.
Canadian police understand the problem. Reports of fraud have more than doubled since 2013, Statistics Canada says. David Coffey, a detective with the Toronto Police Service, sees that human toll daily. “It's the physical destruction of people,” Coffey said. “There’s suicides, there’s homicides as a result of fraud.”
But often, Canadian police tell victims like Ben they either don’t know how to solve such cases or don’t have the time or resources to try.
Yvon Dandurand, a criminologist and professor at the University of the Fraser Valley, said Canadian police, in general, lack the resources they need to effectively investigate such cases, letting scammers operate “with impunity.”
Between 2013 and 2023, the clearance rate for fraud cases in Canada has dropped from about 31 per cent to less than 11 per cent, according to Statistics Canada.
“If you’re going to get involved in a crime for profit, go for fraud,” Dandurand said.
A federal financial crimes agency, promised years ago, has no set timeline for operations. Police departments — even the most innovative — are swamped.
All of this underscores an uncomfortable reality: as Canadians are scammed out of billions of their hard-earned money, governments still don’t see fraud as a national priority, leaving victims with no recourse, no money and no sense of justice.
“There's no broken bones and nobody has passed away. But this hurts,” Ben said. “And if you’re out there and this happens to you, it takes a toll. It feels like there’s blood and broken bones. You just can’t see it.”
The big wave
The explosion of fraud in Canada has many sources.
One is unlikely: COVID-19.
For years, scammers used the internet to target victims online.
The pandemic, Coffey said, kicked that into overdrive. Canadians were isolated, scared and constantly online. Criminals took advantage.
By the summer of 2020, the federal finance department was already internally warning about an unexpected explosion in white-collar crime, according to internal briefing notes obtained by the IJF.
And unlike pandemic restrictions, the crime wave never ended. “I call it the tsunami of cyber-enabled fraud,” said John Armit, an investigator with the Ontario Provincial Police and the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre.
“I’ve been in law enforcement, including my police days, for 30 years. I’ve never seen something like this.”
In 2020, that centre received roughly 68,800 reports from victims detailing losses of around $164.6 million.
In just three years, the numbers more than tripled. In 2023, the centre received more than 116,000 reports detailing losses of about $554 million.
Jeff Thomson, a senior intelligence officer with the centre, said they consider 75 per cent of those cases to be “cyber-enabled,” meaning the fraudster first contacts the victim over the internet.
Thomson warns those figures only scratch the surface. He estimates the anti-fraud centre’s reports represent between five and 10 per cent of actual fraud.
“Fraud is very under-reported for various reasons,” Thomson said. “A victim might be ashamed. They don’t want to discuss what happened to them. They don’t want to report unless they’re guaranteed restitution and they get their money back.”
For police and securities investigators, it’s been overwhelming. Sammy Wu, the investigations manager for the B.C. Securities Commission (BCSC), described his workload as “insane.”
“I’ve been in law enforcement, including my police days, for 30 years,” Wu said. “I’ve never seen something like this.”
It isn’t just the volume of cases, Wu said. The scammers got smarter. They began crafting sleek-looking websites that look like legitimate investment opportunities. More recently, Armit said he has seen scammers use generative artificial intelligence to make their schemes even more convincing.
Wu said he had even seen fraudsters create websites for phony securities regulators, including one that used the BCSC’s own website as a template.
“They put a fake name on it that said ‘The Crypto Commission of El Salvador,’” Wu said.
And instead of pocketing the money and running, Wu said scammers have begun spending weeks or months establishing romantic or platonic relationships with victims online, then gradually enticing them to invest more and more of their money.
It’s a style of scam that’s colloquially known as “pig butchering,” borrowed from a Chinese phrase that means to eat something “from snout to tail.”
“It's the physical destruction of people. There’s suicides, there’s homicides as a result of fraud.”
The emergence of this type of scam is not an accident. Law enforcement sources interviewed for this article said it is being driven largely by criminal groups, particularly in Southeast Asia and West Africa.
Investigative journalists including Cambodia’s Mech Dara and groups like the United Nations have reported that the people conducting those scams are often victims themselves, forced by gangs to work brutally long days in massive compounds in Myanmar and Cambodia.
Erin West, a Santa Clara district attorney, has become one of the foremost voices speaking out about the threat of pig butchering, something she said countries like the United States and Canada underestimate.
Unlike conventional scams, West said, pig butchering operators spend days or weeks learning about a victim’s possessions. They may not end the scheme until they’ve drained retirement funds and life savings.
“These aren’t small thefts — these are the thefts of their entire net worth,” West said.
Chasing crypto
Despite the severity of the losses, West said many victims are initially told by police there’s little they can do.
Things in Canada aren’t so different. Police interviewed for this story said many fraud cases are simply never investigated.
That’s not from a lack of desire to help. Police like Staff Sgt. Cameron Graham, who leads the Ottawa Police Services’ fraud unit, says officers are simply overwhelmed.
The fraud unit’s case volume, Graham said, has doubled since 2014, even though its full-time staffing has actually dropped. The result, he said, is that officers have to pick and choose which cases have a reasonable shot at ending in an arrest.
“The vast majority are files we close because we don’t have the resources or time to deal with it,” Graham said.
Fraud cases have always been difficult, because solving them means following the money. Today, that means tracking cryptocurrency, digital tokens that have become the lifeblood of fraud.
These guys are using laser guns and the rest of us are on horses using bows and arrows,”
RCMP Insp. Adrienne Vickery said that unlike conventional money, cryptocurrency can be moved across the world in a matter of minutes.
“Wherever there’s an opportunity to exploit a technology or any other mechanism to be able to enable criminality, illicit actors go for it,” Vickery said.
Vickery said a recent internal data audit found the rate of cryptocurrency-enabled crime reported to RCMP had increased by a staggering 898 per cent since 2018.
Vickery said cryptocurrency was involved in all types of crimes, but the leading types were investment scams, romance frauds and pig butchering.
Contrary to popular belief, cryptocurrency is not untraceable. When cryptocurrency is moved, those transfers are logged on the blockchain, an immutable public ledger showing what has gone where.
Vickery said the RCMP now have four dedicated teams of cryptocurrency investigators, and regularly work with private companies to help officers trace where the money goes.
But following the money doesn’t mean you can get it back. Cryptocurrency exchanges in Canada are regulated. Often, Wu said scammers trick victims into transferring the money to dodgy exchanges overseas. Vickery said those exchanges are often in countries with lax anti-money laundering laws where authorities are unlikely to co-operate with Canadian police.
“The bad guys don’t care about jurisdictions, and we get all hung up on jurisdiction,” Graham said.
Even if an officer solves a case, they still need to convince a Crown prosecutor that there’s a strong chance of conviction. And in Canada, that trial usually has to conclude within 18 months of charges being laid, a timeline Graham, Armit and Coffey say is prohibitively tight for financial crime investigations.
“To be frank, a lot of the Crown attorneys I talk to have no interest in fraud, because it’s a challenge to get through the court system,” Armit said.
British Columbia offers a case study of the declining rate of fraud prosecutions.
In 2016, Crown prosecutors in that province approved charges in about 75 per cent of the 1,286 reports they received from police, according to data obtained by a Freedom of Information request.
But in 2023, the number of cases submitted to the Crown had dropped to just 633, indicating police are recommending fewer and fewer criminal charges for fraud. Prosecutors ultimately approved charges in just 58 per cent of those cases.
Police officers interviewed for this story say it underlines a bigger problem: fraud isn’t treated with the same urgency as more visible crimes in the eyes of police, the public or politicians.
“They don’t associate true victimhood to fraud,” Coffey said. “There’s no blood in the eyes of the court or the public. But I daresay people who have that perception have never been a victim of mortgage fraud, have never had their house stolen from them, have never had hundreds of thousands stolen from them in a romance scam.”
‘Using bows and arrows to fight laser guns’
Some victims, frustrated by police inaction, take matters into their own hands. They hire auditors, detectives or lawyers to try and track their money themselves.
In the worst-case scenario, victims are defrauded a second time by dubious “recovery” services, which are often scams themselves.
But even when victims hire reputable professionals and start to track the money, they say police sometimes turn them away, passing up a chance to crack open a case.
Greg Tweed, a private investigator in Vancouver, routinely works for clients who have lost money in cryptocurrency scams, ranging from thousands to millions of dollars.
Tweed’s job is to use specially licensed software to trace where the money has gone. When that’s done, Tweed said, he usually gives the client a report to bring to police, in the hope they can request a freeze on lost assets. Sometimes, Tweed said, he even includes contact information for the right person at a given cryptocurrency exchange.
But whether police accept and act on those reports, Tweed said, is “hit or miss.”
And if police don’t take a case, a victim may resort to a civil proceeding. Last year, one of Tweed’s former clients — who said they lost $400,000 in a scam — filed a B.C. Supreme Court petition, asking three cryptocurrency exchanges to disclose where his money had gone.
In a separate case, a West Vancouver businessman claimed he lost $3 million after meeting a scammer on the Chinese social media platform WeChat. He also sued a cryptocurrency exchange with a similar request for disclosure.
You can’t arrest your way out of this. You can’t sanction your way out of this. But I think we have to use everything we have on this,”
The lawyer for both those plaintiffs, Justin Giovanetti, declined to comment for this story.
David Oswald, an Ontario forensic accountant, said clients frequently turn to his firm after being turned away by police. That means fraud often only gets investigated when someone has the money to hire private help.
“There’s a whole lot of people who just can’t afford it. They just write it off and let the guy go,” Oswald said.
Oswald and Tweed expressed sympathy for the police. Tweed said scammers are getting more sophisticated each year. “These guys are using laser guns and the rest of us are on horses using bows and arrows,” Tweed said.
Tweed thinks police should have a protocol to accept reports from private-sector operators like him. And more broadly, he thinks police departments need dedicated resources and investigators trained to fight fraudsters on their level.
”With fraudsters, this isn’t their only fraud. They’ve been doing this for years, they’ve been fine-tuning it,” Tweed said. “And the officers, they don’t have the same experience as the fraudster. It’s not a level playing field.”
Scam czar
In 2022, West won a rare victory in the war against online fraud.
As a district attorney in Santa Clara, she tracked down US$300,000 that had been swindled from a 30-year-old software engineer in a pig butchering scam. West convinced the cryptocurrency exchange Binance to fork over most of the money — about 70 per cent.
That victory has become the stuff of legend for the people fighting against online fraud, if only because it proved defeat was not certain.
“We’re not going to be able to eradicate the problem completely, don’t get me wrong. But we can make a dent."
West has since started an international campaign called "Operation Shamrock" trying to rally police, securities regulators and governments to address pig butchering. In remarks to the U.S. Congress, West described it as a “novel war.”
“There are a lot of people who will say, you can’t educate your way out of this. You can’t arrest your way out of this. You can’t sanction your way out of this. But I think we have to use everything we have on this,” West said.
“Everything we have” is more or less the approach that law enforcement and regulatory sources said was needed.
Part of that approach is education. The other side of that coin is educating the public. “One of my responsibilities is screaming it to the world as loud as I can,” Coffey said.
But the BCSC’s Wu said he also favours a strategy of disruption – basically, trying to knock scammers off their game.
Wu said the BCSC has taken action to remove scam websites from the internet. They’ve built relationships with cryptocurrency exchanges – the compliant ones, anyway – to help freeze and track assets, making it harder for scammers to move money. And they’ve sent warning letters to “money mules” who move money on behalf of scammers, warning them they could be prosecuted.
“We’re not going to be able to eradicate the problem completely, don’t get me wrong. But we can make a dent,” Wu said.
Long term, advocates say a united strategy is needed. West has suggested creating a “scam czar” for the United States. Wu proposed a dedicated Canadian team to tackle pig butchering. Dandurand, the SFU criminologist, said Canada should fast-track the creation of a federal Financial Crimes Agency – something the government has long promised but has not offered a timeline on.
“Ten years of patrolling the streets is not preparing you for an international financial investigation,” Dandurand said. “You need forensic accountants and people who are extremely familiar with financial tools and institutions, including asset tracing,” Dandurand said.
At stake, West said, is billions of dollars of wealth, and tens of thousands of lives that are changed and sometimes ended by fraud.
“It didn’t feel right to me that regular people who had done the right thing all their lives, who have paid their taxes, who have been good citizens, aren’t able to get any help from law enforcement when they’ve suffered the biggest theft imaginable,” West said.