Canada's emergency scam: a spike, then a collapse

Why this case matters

Almost every category on this site goes up. This one went up and then came down, and that is worth understanding, because it is evidence that a scam type can be pushed back rather than merely endured.

The shape is unambiguous. Losses roughly quintupled between 2021 and 2023, then fell by 72% in a single year and kept falling. Crucially, reports and victim counts fell alongside the dollars. If this were an artefact of people reporting less, you would expect losses to hold up while reports dropped; instead all three moved together.

What was different about this scheme

The grandparent scam has a feature that most do not: it requires somebody to physically show up.

Money is collected by courier, at the door, in cash. That gives police something almost no other scam category offers — a person, at a known address, at a known time. Couriers can be arrested, and sometimes followed. Several Canadian police forces ran operations during the peak that did exactly that, and the CAFC pushed sustained public warnings at the same time.

That combination — a physical chokepoint plus a public that had been warned about a specific script — is a plausible explanation for the decline. It is not a proven one; this page is describing a correlation in reported data, not an evaluated intervention.

The caution that has to come with it

Three things could also be happening, and honesty requires naming them.

The scheme may have migrated rather than stopped. The “hi mum” text variant, which needs no courier at all, grew over the same period, and a shift between categories in the same dataset would look exactly like this.

Reported losses are a floor everywhere, and the CAFC says plainly that only a small fraction of fraud in Canada reaches it. A decline in a floor is weaker evidence than a decline in a measurement.

And 2025 covers nine months, not twelve — although even annualised it stays well below the peak.

What it tells you about the scheme

The useful conclusion is about where scams are actually vulnerable. This one was interrupted not by better filtering or better technology, but at the point where the crime had to touch the physical world. That is a general lesson: the parts of a scheme that cannot be automated are the parts that can be reached.