Canadians have suffered greatly from personal fraud

The value of losses due to fraud against individuals in Canada exceeded $16 billion in five years.

The latest figures released by Canada on Monday revealed this.

In 2019, one in six people said they had been scammed in the past five years.

The average value of losses was over $5,000, with a median loss of $600.

Most fraud victims suffered no loss (38%) or less than $250 (16%). However, some people have suffered much higher losses. About 3% of victims suffered losses worth more than $10,000, and 0.5% suffered losses of $100,000 or more.

Fraud, more often

Of all the crimes measured during the 2019 General Social Survey (GSS) on the Safety of Canadians, fraud was the most frequent crime.

More than 5 million people in Canada aged 15 and over report being the victim of at least one scam in the past five years.

“According to police-reported data through the Uniform Crime Reporting Survey, fraud accounted for 12 per cent of the crime severity index in 2021, almost double from 10 years ago (6.5 per cent),” says Statistics Canada.

Thus, the number of frauds has increased from 87,174 cases in 2011 to 168,483 cases by 2021. The rate of robbery, a violent crime like fraud, quadrupled during this period.