Cybercriminals target Burnaby residents

Loretta Houben clearly remembers the day Queen Elizabeth died, but not for the usual reasons. 

“I love to record everything in a journal. It was the day the Queen died, Queen Elizabeth. September 8, 2022.”

It was a gorgeous, sunny day, and Houben and her family decided to eat on the outside deck of their Burnaby home. As they sat down to their meal, her husband’s phone rang. He ignored the interruption. Only later, Houben saw a message from her sister and immediately called her mother. 

Houben’s mother, who was usually very calm and cautious, sounded distraught on the phone. The story she narrated over the phone was, indeed, distressing. Someone had called Houben’s 90-year-old mother and claimed to be Houben’s son. Over a long phone call that seemed to last almost an hour, the man on the other side of the call claimed to be in jail, beaten up, with broken bones. He said he needed his grandmother to bail him out immediately. 

“Do not tell my folks,” he said. 

The voice on the line sounded identical to Houben’s son’s, and her mother thought it must be her favourite grandson. Even Houben’s father thought it was her son. Later, Houben’s husband suggested that the callers may have used artificial intelligence (AI) to duplicate their son’s voice. Houben believes the callers may have obtained personal information about her son from the internet or social media. 

“She let my dad talk to him, and he’s blind. He’s been blind for a while because of glaucoma. And he said it’s him,” Houben told the Beacon. 

The man claiming to be Houben’s son handed the phone to another person who claimed to be a police officer and told Houben’s mother she had one of two choices: either a police officer could come to their home where she and her husband, both in their 90s, lived, to collect $5,000 in bail. Or she could meet him at her bank, where she would withdraw money from her account and pay him in cash. 

“That’s when the alarm bells went off, and she hung up,” Houben said. The callers’ request reminded Houben’s mother of an incident in which a friend was scammed and convinced to withdraw cash from her account, which she never retrieved. The callers did not call again. Houben’s mother then tried to call her and her husband while they were eating on their deck, after which she called her sister, who texted Houben’s son. It turned out that he was at work, alive and well—and definitely not incarcerated. 

Houben immediately called the RCMP non-emergency line to report the incident. The dispatch said, “Did your mom give them money?” When Houben said no, the RCMP dispatch said she could do nothing for them. 

“She sounded like she was in a hurry,” Houben said. 

The experience was frightening for Houben and her family, mixed with disappointment in the RCMP response. It also left scars; to this day, Houben’s mother does not like to talk about the incident. Her mother no longer answers the phone unless it is a number she recognizes. The family also created a new “password” system. Family members must now provide a password whenever they call each other, a word or phrase they agree on before they can continue a phone conversation. 

“My motto in life is: trust nobody. So I’m safe. But I was really concerned about them because I know when you get older, you’re easily swayed by your emotions. Just because it sounded like my son, they thought it was him,” Houben said. 

If it’s too good to be true…

Mary Mancini needed a step stool to reach the higher cupboards in her Burnaby home, and the one advertised on Facebook seemed perfect. The price was excellent, too, just $20. The Facebook page had the Bed Bath and Beyond logo at the top and looked very legitimate. The large home goods chain was liquidating its assets and closing its stores in Canada at the time, so Mancini thought it was a closing sale. 

She added the stool to her “cart” and completed all the checkout procedures, filling in her email address, credit card number, and home address. 

“Everything looked so real until I got to the end where it said, ‘your confirmation number will be emailed to you. I never got an email or a confirmation number, and I started to get a little worried that something didn’t look right. So I called Bed Bath and Beyond and said, ‘I saw you guys on Facebook.’ Right away, he said, ‘We’re not on Facebook; we don’t advertise on Facebook,’” Mancini told the Beacon. 

She promptly called her credit card company and cancelled her card, but the card company never refunded her. She also tried searching for a mechanism to report the page on Facebook, but she could not find a straightforward way. She later searched for Bed Bath and Beyond’s website, and the scammers’ page looked almost identical. 

Mancini said the experience made her feel “really violated.” 

“Why does Facebook allow these kinds of ads to go on their social media?” she said, “It did make me feel stupid, but then I thought, you know what, this could really happen to anybody. Their site looked so legitimate, and when I Googled Bed Bath and Beyond, their site was almost identical.” Still, she’s grateful she only lost $20 in return for a valuable lesson in online safety. 

“Now I’m very, very careful. If something’s too good to be true, it probably is.” She advises everyone to trust their gut instinct if something feels “off.” 

No happy endings 

While the stories of Houben and Mancini have relatively happy endings, this is not the case for many who are victimized by cyber-enabled crimes. According to Statistics Canada, there were 74,073 incidents of cybercrime reported to the police in 2022, of which there were 18,194 in BC. Children are especially vulnerable, as in the case of the 12-year-old boy who died by suicide after falling prey to online sextortion in Prince George, BC, last November. The case is not isolated; many similar cases occur daily throughout Canada. 

According to Cpl. Philip Ho of the Burnaby RCMP Economic Crimes Unit, some children can fall prey to bullying or other cybercrimes through various avenues, including gaming platforms and social media. Often, the parents are unaware of what lurks behind the facade of these platforms and the risks to their children. Ho believes that the “cybercrime talk” is a new type of conversation parents should have with their children to protect them from harm. 

According to Ho, chatrooms, social media, and other online spaces are not monitored or policed adequately; mostly, they are on a “self-reporting basis” where people report what they see online, rather than anyone actively policing those spaces to ensure no crimes are being committed. 

“The scammers are definitely a few steps ahead with ways to mask themselves, with software or tools,” Ho said, “One of the biggest challenges of cybercrime is that the cybercrime actors, the suspects in cybercrime, are international.”

Internet phone calls, number spoofing, and cryptocurrency are some of the challenges to the authorities, but Ho said reporting, gathering information, and educating the public are ways to prevent it. 

“The anti-fraud centre is an intelligence gathering entity and branch of the RCMP that can filter out a lot of the information related to scams that have a specific kind of MO or cryptocurrency wallet address that’s recurring and they’ve got reports from all over Canada,” said Ho. “The info is helpful now to link investigations.” 

Ho suggests that anyone who experiences a cyberattack or scam should report it to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre. The centre’s website provides a number for reporting as well as the possibility for reporting online. It also provides information to the public on crime prevention and common scams. 

The proposed online harms bill, C-63, is a glimmer of hope in a landscape with minimal regulation and where authorities are constantly playing catch-up with criminals. Ho’s legislation wish list includes laws that would govern telecommunications companies and prevent scammers from using spoofed numbers online. 

“If there’s legislation in place to ensure our telecommunications companies are putting this technology in place to prevent these fake numbers from going through the network and the verification process, I think that would really reduce scams,” he said. 

Awareness is another piece of the puzzle. In November and December, the City of Burnaby held two online awareness sessions to help citizens protect themselves against cybercrimes. The sessions, which took place over Zoom, aimed to educate citizens on the various scams they may encounter and how to avoid falling victim. However, the sessions were over Zoom and had few attendees, questioning their reach and effectiveness. Seniors, such as Houben’s parents, may be unable to access online sessions. 

Mancini and Houben both said they were unaware of any sessions run by the City of Burnaby or the federal government’s anti-fraud centre.  

Houben, for example, suggests printed flyers or pamphlets with information in the mail for seniors like her parents, who only sometimes use online platforms, such as Zoom, as ways to raise awareness. 

Recently, the RCMP experienced its own cyberattack. On Feb. 23, it announced that RCMP systems had been targeted, but there was no known risk to the public. 

This piece was made possible by the Local Journalism Initiative.

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