About a month after Clair Elden’s elderly mother activated her cellphone, she started getting text messages claiming to be from Amazon. Then she received a voicemail threatening her with legal action, saying she owed the online retail giant around $10,000 for orders.
It wasn’t hard for Elden of Duncan, B.C., to deduce that something was fishy.
“My mom doesn’t have a computer,” Elden said. “She doesn’t do anything online.”
Elden says they called RCMP, who gave them a number to report phone scams. She also tried to contact Amazon and but got no response.
She said RCMP told her to call her mother’s cellphone provider to block the number and she hasn’t been bothered since.
Vanessa Iafolla, a financial crimes researcher at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, N.S., and an anti-fraud consultant, praised how Elden handled her mother’s situation, being proactive and keeping the lines of communication open.
“Talking to people, having open conversations, asking questions, this is the kind of thing that will help people avoid being victimized in the first place,” she said.
Elden’s experience also highlights how difficult it can be to get the attention of authorities when it comes to scams at a time when fraudulent messages appear to be on the rise.
Reporting cases to institutions like the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre is important, but “police don’t really do much and they don’t have the capacity to do much,” she said.
