Grandparent scams steal millions from seniors. Organized crime made Montreal a hotbed for them

CBC

19-03-2025

CBC News is investigating grandparent scams and their link to Montreal. This story is part one of a three-part series.
In June 2024, eight young men and women were working the phones inside a squat, two-storey building next to Lakeshore Road in Pointe-Claire, a suburb in Montreal's West Island, when police officers stormed in.
In an indictment unsealed earlier this month, Michael Drescher, the district attorney of Vermont, said the group was caught in the act that day. They were placing phone calls to "elderly victims in Virginia," pretending to be their grandkids and asking for money.
Drescher alleged that the group, and 17 other Canadians — nearly all from the Montreal area, and many from the West Island suburbs — was part of an elaborate international scam network that defrauded hundreds of American seniors out of a total of more than $21 million US.
The indictment details how the group, and their alleged accomplices, performed a carefully choreographed fraud — known as a grandparent scam — at multiple call centres in the Montreal area, allegedly under the leadership of Gareth West, a 38-year-old from Burlington, Ont.
But it was not the first time police officers raided scam call centres in the Montreal area and arrested groups — called "cells" in court documents — involved in grandparent scams.
CBC News has found that police targeted a similar grandparent scam network operating in Montreal just months earlier that was strikingly similar to the recent case. Police and experts say the scams appear to be connected to organized crime.
'Hi grandma'
American officials believe West's alleged grandparent scam operation began in the summer of 2021, mere months after the authorities broke up a different operation allegedly run by a Montrealer named Anthony David Di Rienzo.
A summary of facts filed in court detailing the allegations against Di Rienzo says his scam began in 2019 and ran until March 24, 2021, when police arrested 15 people in the Montreal area and simultaneously arrested U.S. accomplices whose job was to collect money from victims.
The allegations against Di Rienzo and his group mirror the ones against West and his group.
For instance, both networks exclusively targeted seniors in the U.S. Both involved multiple "cells" operating out of "call centres." Both employed teams in the U.S. whose job was to pick up the money sent by a victim to abandoned or vacant addresses in the U.S.
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Court documents filed in the Di Rienzo case allege that the group targeted American seniors and varied the states they were calling each day because they believed it made it harder for police to track them down.
The authorities in both the U.S. and in Canada have levelled similar claims against both of the groups allegedly run by West and Di Rienzo. The groups allegedly had similar organizational structures and chose their victims in similar ways: police say the head of the network delivered daily lists of potential victims to the cells.
Those lists contained information including the name, age, address, phone number and income of possible victims. Neither the court documents filed in the U.S. or in Canada say where those lists came from, but police have said the information could have come from data leaks or even simply from publicly available sources.
The cells then called the victims, and, according to conversation recordings obtained by police through wiretaps in the Di Rienzo case, they started each call with the same words: "Hi, grandpa" or "Hi, grandma."
What followed was a carefully orchestrated fraud to convince the elderly victim that the scammer was actually the victim's grandchild and needed money. Usually, they said they had been wrongfully accused of a drug crime and required a surety — typically around $9,000 for bail.
Once the victim was adequately convinced, other cell members called them, this time pretending to be police officers or lawyers, giving them the details of how and where to send the money.
Court documents both in the U.S. and Canada say the Di Rienzo and West scams used that same strategy to convince hundreds of American seniors to send money, but they targeted thousands of potential victims. Each cell allegedly called dozens of people per day.
But all the while, both groups attracted the attention of police in the U.S. and in Montreal, ending in their eventual arrests and criminal charges being laid.
A spokesperson for Quebec's provincial police force, the Sûreté du Québec (SQ), which was heavily involved in the operation that led to Di Rienzo's arrest, said the two investigations were separate and police had not linked them.
Steve Belzil, the head of the economic crimes division at the Service de Police de la ville de Montréal, said Montreal police and their partners at the Ontario Provincial Police and Homeland Security in the U.S. have been active in investigating grandparent scammers in Montreal.
But he said scam call centres operate across the country, not just in Montreal. However, he noted that investigators in the city have established links between the grandparent scam networks and larger organized crime groups.
Organized crime links
Belzil said the major grandparent scam networks in Montreal tend to have connections to the Italian Mafia.
On that day in March 2021, when police were conducting raids in Montreal and in the U.S., arresting Di Rienzo's alleged group, Quebec provincial police arrested a man named Francesco Sollecito.
Sollecito's name appears in court documents tied to the case as a "relevant person" who communicated using the name "Frank."
But though the documents say he was arrested alongside Di Rienzo and the rest of the group who were later charged, Sollecito was not.
A spokesperson for the director of criminal prosecutions in Quebec, the DPCP, said they could not, in this case, disclose the reasons why no charges were laid. Sollecito has never been charged with a crime in Quebec.
Sollecito is one of the sons of Rocco Sollecito, who was an ally of the Rizzutos, the reputed crime family that ruled the Montreal Mafia for years. Rocco was shot dead in Laval, Que., in 2016.
But there are rumours that his son Stefano Sollecito, Francesco's brother, may have taken over as one of the heads of the Mafia in Montreal, according to Antonio Nicaso, a Mafia expert who has authored more than 40 books on organized crime and teaches the subject at Queen's University.
Stefano was charged with gangsterism and conspiracy to traffic narcotics but he was acquitted in 2018.
Nicaso said organized crime has been trying to diversify its revenue streams and may have been looking to see if grandparent scams are a viable source of income.
And if they aren't already involved, they very likely will be soon, he said.
"I have the feeling that this is what happened or what will happen in the near future because there is a lot of money to be made," he said.
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Trial later this year
The men alleged to be behind the Di Rienzo scam group have been charged with conspiracy to commit fraud, fraud and attempted fraud. Their case is winding through the courts and could go to trial later this year.
The 25 people recently charged in the West group are facing wire fraud charges in the U.S. Most of them face a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison if convicted, but the alleged leaders of the group could spend 40 years behind bars if convicted. Two of them, West and Jimmy Ylimaki, remain at large.
None of the charges have been tested in court.