N.W.T. residents losing hundreds of thousands of dollars each year to scammers, data shows
Data from Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre shows that total losses shot up in 2021
Pat Burnstad said scams targeting elders in her community of Hay River, N.W.T., have been so common, that she arranged for the RCMP to give a presentation about it to a group of seniors in January.
"It's costing us a lot of money as seniors," said Burnstad, who is part of a local seniors' group in Hay River as well as president of the N.W.T. Seniors' Society.
She said she knows many seniors who have fallen victim to all sorts of scams that are putting them out of money. Burnstad herself lost a laptop as a result of an online scam.
But the seniors in Hay River are not alone in being targeted.
CBC News sorted through data from the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre on reported scams in the territory between 2020 and 2024. The centre is a public agency that collects information on fraud.
Over that period, N.W.T. victims lost hundreds of thousands of dollars to various scams — and around half of those losses came in 2021.
N.W.T. saw the largest increase in Canada in 2021
Who has been victimized and where they live in the territory isn't clear. The Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre said it couldn't comment on specific cases and the RCMP said no one was available to talk about the scams. Police did confirm the data was correct.
According to that data, 34 victims in N.W.T. reported just under $10,000 in losses in 2020. The following year saw a similar number of victims — 35 people — but the total amount of money lost shot up to $381,000. That's a 3,810-per-cent increase, the largest increase across Canada over that period, by a wide margin.
More than half of the losses in 2021 — or about $199,000 — was from four individual victims.
After 2021, the annual losses in the N.W.T. were between $200,000 and $250,000. In 2022, two victims lost a total of $199,000.
Burnstad said she and other seniors in Hay River have noticed that since the COVID-19 pandemic, scams have gotten more sophisticated and not as easy to spot.
"We used to get a few here and there. You know, somebody from a foreign country would say, you know, you've lost your uncle and you need to send $100 …you know damn well it's a scam," she said.
Burnstad said some seniors have speculated that the pandemic put a lot of people out of work who then "just sat and hacked us all."
Jeff Horncastle, client and communications officer at the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, said the increase in money lost to scams between 2020 and 2021 could be attributed to people spending more time online as a result of the pandemic.
"A lot of Canadians changed their habits from 2020 to 2021," he said.
"On top of that there was investment fraud that had emerged. Crypto investment particularly … A lot of victims started reporting being a victim to fraudulent crypto investment."
Six people in the N.W.T. reported being a victim of investment fraud in 2021, losing a total of about $138,000.
Horncastle also says that the centre's data may just represent "a drop in the bucket," and the N.W.T.'s losses "could technically be into the millions."
"We estimate that only five to 10 per cent of victims actually report," he said.
Spear phishing
The majority of the N.W.T.'s losses in 2021 — nearly $200,000 — came from so-called spear phishing scams that affected four victims. In 2022, the N.W.T. saw a nearly identical amount lost from spear phishing.
Spear phishing is a targetted scam that involves someone pretending to be a legitimate source to convince a business or individual to send them money.
Horncastle says that of reported frauds, spear phishing scams can often have the biggest impact.
He said for spear phishing scammers to get large sums of money, they often use what's called a "supplier swindle." This is where a scammer will send a company or organization an invoice and ask them to send an amount owing to an alternate account by wire transfer.
"It's definitely an impactful type of fraud that can see very high dollar losses for sure," he said.
"That's why we stressed the awareness education, you know, implementing business practices that have verification stuff."
The N.W.T. isn't alone in falling prey to spear phishing scams. In 2024, one victim in Nunavut lost $3 million to such a scam.
The data for the N.W.T. is part of a feature for CBC's Marketplace airing Friday.
The Marketplace team joins professional scam-busters as they crack into the networks of organized criminal groups, confront the fraudsters and expose how AI is making it so much harder to defend ourselves. Marketplace airs at 8 p.m.