How to… Report Scams

So, you got scammed and now it’s too late. You feel angry and embar­rassed and you wish you had trusted that gut feeling.

What can you do now?

Two words: report it.

The steps you need to take mostly depend on the type of fraud and on the nature of the scam.

How to Avoid... Phone Scams

How many times a day does this sce­nario hap­pen to you? The phone rings and you drop what­ever you were doing to pick it up, only to hear a famil­iar pause, and then a mechan­i­cal voice reel­ing off a script.

“I’m not inter­ested, thank you”. You hang up and sigh. Bloody telemarketers.

How to Avoid... Scammers

Recently, an unbe­liev­able story made the head­lines in France. For three year, a num­ber of inter­nauts sup­ported Noa, a bub­bly seventeen-year old blog­ger, in her fight against can­cer. One day, Noa passes away from the ill­ness, announces Salomé, her twin sis­ter. Salomé, a ski cham­pion, starts blog­ging as well and gath­ers quite a fol­low­ing among peo­ple still dis­traught by Noa’s tragic death.

How to Avoid... Summer Jobs Scams

These days, I noticed a lot of invit­ing posters pop­ping up on sign­posts down­town: “sum­mer job, make $300 a day!”, “last year our employ­ees made $10,000 over the sum­mer” etc. So I set to inves­ti­gate these “great” sum­mer jobs.

How to Avoid... Banking Scams

Who doesn’t have a bank account these days? A check­ing account and a credit card are often essen­tial to every­day life but unfor­tu­nately, bank­ing comes with a num­ber of scams.
I strongly encour­age new­com­ers to Canada to get famil­iar with the local bank­ing sys­tem, includ­ing debit cards, sav­ing accounts, credit cards and credit reports.

How to Avoid... Email Scams

I’m such a lucky girl. Some­times, I get out-of-the-blue emails from strangers all around the world who want to share their life sav­ing with me, or sim­ply want to give me money.
And look at what I recently received: a job offer! In Canada! I couldn’t resist shar­ing it with you.After all, I may be the only per­son in the entire world who received it. Told you I was lucky.

How to Avoid... Identity Theft

Of all the frauds and scams around, iden­tity theft is prob­a­bly one of the scari­est of all. It’s sneaky and the con­se­quences can be huge, not to men­tion that clear­ing the whole mess up can be Kafkaesque. How to prove that some­one else assumes your iden­tity? How to prove that you are not respon­si­ble for your fraud­u­lent alter ego’s actions? The con­se­quences of this crime can be felt for years.

How to Avoid.. Consumer Scams

Unlike in France, the cus­tomer is king in North Amer­ica. This means that busi­nesses take cus­tomer ser­vice seri­ously and every­thing is made to make your life eas­ier: long open­ing hours, gen­er­ous return poli­cies, cus­tomer help desk, toll-free num­bers… Unfor­tu­nately, there are also a few scams going around.

How to Avoid... Employment Scams

I was a French teacher for the fed­eral gov­ern­ment for four years. Once day, as I was hav­ing lunch in on the Sta­tis­tic Canada cam­pus, I was approached by two guys. They intro­duced them­selves and explained there were “work­ing here” and took an inter­est in the papers I was grading.

How to Avoid... Immigration Fraud

I recently com­plained about the num­ber of scams going on in Thai­land but I must admit Canada is not per­fect either. While the gov­ern­ment and the police are rel­a­tively corruption-free, and the coun­try is very safe, we have a fair num­ber of scam and fraud problems.