Scammers now impersonating senior government officials and CEOs to swindle Canadians
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'If you receive a message claiming to be from a senior US official, do not assume it is authentic.'
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For the head of the Canadian Cyber Threat Exchange, Jennifer Quaid, these types of scams have become so prevalent that she now suggests to private sector workers that they shouldn't always believe that it's their boss that's calling when the number appears on their phones.
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'Never assume it's your boss,' she told National Post.
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'I would give a CEO, a CFO and my 21-year-old daughter exactly the same advice: stop and think about it. Take a minute to think about what the request is, and then say, 'I will call you back' and reach out to that person using another known channel of communication,' she added.
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'If your boss is serious about wanting you to transfer $20 million, I don't think they're going to object to your saying, 'I will call you right back'.'
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Just in the first three months of 2025, the Anti-Fraud Centre says it has received nearly 13,000 reports of fraud generating over $165 million in losses for 9,092 victims. But as always, that is only the tip of the iceberg as the vast majority of victims don't report the crime to authorities.
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Both the Cyber Centre and Quaid say AI has tremendously boosted criminals' ability to make their scams more believable. But Quaid also believes that threat actors not being constrained by legal AI guardrails has allowed them to harness AI faster and more effectively than businesses trying to defend themselves.
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'They're not using it with rules. We have rules, and I want to be very clear, rules are a very good thing,' Quaid said of scammers. 'But they are operating in a criminal environment without rules, without regard to due process and without regard to privacy, and that's why they're able to do more with some of these tools than we are.'
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In recent weeks, government agencies have increasingly warned Canadians that scammers are spoofing their phone numbers to appear legitimate. Spoofing allows fraudsters display a fake number on a phone's caller ID.
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Even organizations like the Communications Security Establishment, the country's cyberdefence agency, have not been spared.
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