OTTAWA – Canada’s Financial Intelligence Directorate says various criminal entities have engaged in scams to access government pandemic assistance in the first few months of the benefits launch.
According to a 2020 Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Center of Canada (FINTRAC) report provided to CTV News, the Canadian Emergency Benefit (CEB) and the Canada Business Emergency Account (CEBA) appear to be “knowingly and actively defrauded ”by individuals, crooks or criminals and by criminal organizations.
The report found that those who tried to defraud the CERB program did so by making multiple claims online for benefits using stolen personal information and social insurance numbers.
Criminal organizations reportedly hire groups of individuals to cash benefit checks at “various places in town.”
“In one case, the reporting entity indicated that social media was being used as a means of recruiting these people,” the report says.
The CEBA-related fraud was carried out in a similar fashion, with the loan being transferred from the applicant’s business account to their personal account and then withdrawn in cash.
At the individual level, scammers would often buy a single load prepaid card and then upgrade it to a loadable card “where they arrange for funds to be directly deposited”. Individual fraud typically occurred among claimants who did not qualify for benefits, including those living outside of Canada and employed while also receiving income support, according to the report.
The report also states that payments were made to those who engaged in “illegal or suspicious financial activities”.
CERB was created at the start of the pandemic to support people unemployed directly because of the COVID-19 pandemic. He then moved on to the Canadian Intervention Allowance. As of November 7, nearly 2.3 million applicants have applied for assistance, for a total of $ 28 billion.
The CEBA, also implemented in the spring of 2020, has provided interest-free loans to Canadian businesses and nonprofits to help them cover their expenses. As of November 4, 898, 114 companies had accessed the loan, for a total of $ 49 billion.
In the financial transaction files that FINTRAC collected from its reporting entities, it found 6,589 unique Suspicious Transaction Reports (STRs) related to the pandemic, covering the period January 1 to June 30, 2020. As of of these, the organization identified 395 suspicious transaction reports with “accounts detailing various types of fraudulent activity involving CERB and CEBA.
The intelligence wing did not detail in the report the total amount of money distributed by CERB and CEBA that went to organized crime.
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