Beware Of The Scammers ! :-( | Your stories | Discussion forum

$750,000 is a large portion of most people's life savings. But, I'm not so sure it was a significant part of the victim's.

$750,000 is 7.5X the $100,000 CDIC limit. That's quite a risk to take to go that much over the CDIC limit with PC Financial. The story doesn't mention that the victim even tried to get the debt rating of PC Financial to see how risky the uninsured portion of the GIC would be. I suspect the $750,000 was, fortunately, not a significant part of his savings.

The 6½% rate for a GIC (one-year ?) is extraordinary in today's GIC market.

@mordko
I never click a URL in an email or text, no matter who sent it.
Verify your links and put them in YOUR bookmarks.
Yes maybe some one could be on call to oversee. But I have that “thing” that I don’t want my children to be aware of my savings. I have doubled up my own way of securing my cash savings. And we limit CDIC accounts at $96000 including interest. And say if we both have RRIFs at the same FI we each don’t exceed $48000.

It seems this is a common scam. I had a similar incident of a person saying they worked for CIBC Private Wealth Division. I visited a branch and sure enough, the name he gave me was a listed employee. The website also looked legit as did the phone number he provided. The only indicators of a scam were the inflated GIC rate and the email address that had CIBC in it but with a suspicious add-on. These scammers are scary good. BEWARE.

Kirk said
It seems this is a common scam. I had a similar incident of a person saying they worked for CIBC Private Wealth Division. … The only indicators of a scam were the inflated GIC rate and the email address that had CIBC in it but with a suspicious add-on. These scammers are scary good. BEWARE.

There were scammers who were posing as UBS Bank Canada earlier using the ubs-eng.com e-mail domain instead of the authentic ubs.com domain.

I still live by the mantra "Everything on the internet is a lie." I don't provide an E-mail address to anyone, government or not, and when I do use E-mail I use one of my stable of burner accounts.

Friends often ask me to try to verify unsolicited offers coming to them as E-mails or pop-ups. They are ALWAYS, without exception, frauds. I've never found a single one that was even just misleading. If it comes to you instead of the reverse, shoot first and don't bother with questions.

Theregister.com reports that this month, Hewlett-Packard tried adding an unidentified 15-minute wait to ALL incoming customer calls before putting them into the response cue! They were trying, as always, to force customers to use the usually-useless web assistance. HP dropped the policy after clients complained AND customer service reps complained all their calls started with a burst of uncooperative outrage.

This is not new. Even more than five years ago, when I quit Tangerine, I received the "high volume of calls" message with a silly wait time, I'd often get connected immediately. It was just to discourage callers wanting real people to solve real problems.

One case where it's not the case - Telus really does have estimated wait times of over an hour, and they mean it. I assume all the big telcoms are similar.

The only harm of giving out email is the number of spam email you may receive.
Other than that, no other harm especially since you practice "everything on the internet is a lie". That is actually a good practice. I teach my 20 years old, NEVER trust any email any text any phone call that ask for money, even it they say "they have your papa" or whatever reason it may be. In this day and age, anything can be fabricated by AI.
As for the seniors in the family, it is very hard to teach them to be vigilant. They are too prone to the grand parent effect.
Most scams that are out there (incl this particular case) is just low level scam in my mind. Nothing sophisticated. If one is not greedy, fact check, and not act on FOMO, these scams would not have worked at all.
Even the Fed agent scam that we read re a lady being scammed out of $50k or whatever. Seriously one would believe that and hand their cash over ???

Alexandre said
I feel bad for this gentleman, but at his age he should have learned to take responsibility for his actions. Instead, he blames CIBC for allowing wire transfer go through that he requested.
In a similar situation I think it were a bank that said brutally honest thing: "You are either competent to make your own decisions in regard to your banking account, but if not - we should close your account."  

The bank account holder is responsible for his/her bank account, but the bank should help the elder people, for example, verify the institution number of the account on another side. I think it is not difficult to verify if the receiver's account belongs to PC Financial or not, PC Financial 's institution number is 010 ( is it?), CIBC has the same 010 institution number.

I think CIBC should take some blame, they said they have processes and controls in place but all they did was ask the guy a few questions and then let the money go through. I'm sure the guy told them the money is to purchase a GIC at another bank, don't banks check the account to where large sums of money are going to verify that it's legit? Because if they don't they should.

usephrase said

The bank immediately froze my banking card after I withdrew on an ATM machine in the different city.

Banks DO have certain anti-fraud security in place but they cannot protect us from our own stupidity.

A long while ago my credit card was cancelled when I paid for TTC parking at Finch. That was 'suspicious transaction' as I Never did that before. I was little bit inconvenienced but I applaud bank to be on a lookout for fraudulent transactions.

I don't know the inside workings of a bank but I suppose if they were asking questions they would have become suspicious as to why the money was being transferred to someone else's account in order to buy the GIC.

The victim may be at fault but in my opinion the bank was negligent in not spotting the fraud or even caring enough to ensure an old man was not getting conned out of his life savings. And if I was transferring a huge amount of money you better be sure I would want the bank to do more than ask a couple of questions before letting the money go through.