Scammers in Canada - will affect every immigrant

I want to tell you why you shouldn't buy a visa to Canada and the potential problems you'll 100% face after you move.

Today I'm going to cover the topic of visa fraud, fraudulent calls and SMS, and leaks of personal information. I will give recommendations on how to protect yourself from fraud. Although I must admit, I almost fell for the hackers' attack myself. Although I am a programmer and have a master's degree in computer science. Let me start with deceptive phone calls but before that a small digression. There will be several, but they are important, so read to the end.

Tax fraud

In Canada, it is a very serious crime to cheat on your taxes. Every adult resident is required to file a tax return once a year, stating their income and expenses. It is enough to give just the numbers, no supporting documents are required from you.

But sometimes the Canadian tax authorities do checks, I've had it several times and had to send scans of invoices and contracts. For example, in Canada, they pay benefits for children, and we, as soon as we immigrated, received every month about CAD 1,500 for three children. One day a letter came asking for proof of the children living with us in Canada. My friends had changed their address and did not report it, so they missed the letter. And they paid the price for it — they were required to return all of their child benefits and maybe pay a fine as well.

Another time I got audited by our immigration company. I also had to tinker with the documents, my accountant and I did everything, but I had to pay him a decent amount of money for his help. So all the showdowns are very unpleasant.

Imagine receiving a phone call in which a stern voice calls you by name, introduces himself as some official from the tax service, accuses you of not paying tens of thousands of dollars in taxes, and threatens you with prison. If you are a new immigrant, and you don't speak English very well, the shock is guaranteed. And what follows is the acquisition of personal information, which leads at least to the loss of money from the account, and at most — to identity theft. In the latter case, you have a very hard time. I went through this myself but in Ukraine. Back in 2006 they stole my passport and used it to take out loans. I am still wanted by credit organizations.

In the case of such calls, there is one rule — reduce responses to unfamiliar numbers and never give out personal information. In the case of the tax service, ask for all documents to be sent by paper mail. It works reliably in Canada. Unfortunately, scammers have gone further — they have learned to change the numbers that are shown when you call. That is, you may be shown a real bank number, but you won't be talking to bank employees.

Leaked data

Now let's talk about data leaks at Apple. But before we do that, there is a small digression.

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In Canada, air travel is very expensive compared to the U.S. and Europe. To save money, Canadians have to use low costers: Flair Airlines, Swoop Airlines, Lynx Air, etc. They are usually cheaper than the monopoly Air Canada, but travelers complain about delayed flights and lost luggage.

A friend of mine from Toronto recently flew her family to Vancouver to go skiing. Their luggage was lost, and airline support made no effort to find it. Still, the story ended safely because she had put an Airtag, a tiny Apple device that can transmit location for a year without a battery change, in her shoe. An acquaintance tracked her ski flight and simply came to the airport to the baggage claim counter to claim her loss. And the budget airline never responded.

I, too, decided to prepare for domestic air travel and ordered directly from the Apple 4 Airtag website. The reservation system promised free shipping on March 21 via UPS. UPS is a very large American shipping company that has a presence in other countries as well. On the morning of March 13, I received a text message on my phone from Apple about the shipment of my order. But in the evening of the same day, I received another message from an unknown number about the need to pay extra for shipping.

At first glance, it came from UPS — because Apple said it would ship my order by that shipping company. It included my full name, shipping zip code, and my phone number was correct too, otherwise, I wouldn't have received this message. However, I had my doubts about a few things:

1. Apple promised free shipping, and here we are talking about a few dollars.
2. The website address looks like UPS, but if you look closely, the site is weird — looks like scammers!
3. The message was written in English with mistakes.

I clicked on the link from my phone, because it was safer than from my computer, and a page showed up with the UPS logo on it. I was beginning to suspect it was a phishing site disguised as an official UPS site, and the next page would ask me to pay by card. It would then be gone, and I would have a lot of time to sort things out with the bank. But still, I decided to contact Apple support and ask why there was a delivery fee. I was kindly offered to contact UPS support, which I did not do — I already had the experience of waiting on the phone.

So I decided to take a chance — don't do as I did — and pressed the "Continue" button. I was wrong: I was not immediately asked for my card number, but first, they asked for my home address, phone number, email, and date of birth. Just for delivery! In short, pretty much all personal information. There were other additional links on the page, which were shown to masquerade as the UPS site, but of course, they didn't work.

I decided to play a joke on the scammers and entered fake information at every step, including my card number, but the site let me through and said the invoice was paid. Funny enough, I received another text message from a different phone number. It included a different link, hinting at a UPS affiliation.

I firmly believe that Apple or UPS has and probably is leaking data. Let me explain why:

• the payment was made from another person's card with a different payment address, i.e. it is not a leak from the bank;
• the hacker knew that there was a purchase from Apple, and the date of the attack coincided with the date the item was shipped;
• the scammer knew that shipping was supposed to be UPS, so they made a phishing site for UPS.

We're flying to Vancouver, it's warmer than Ottawa, but we plan to go skiing. That's why I wanted to put the Airtag in my boots and put it in my luggage. If it wasn't for them, the Airtag story wouldn't have happened.

We have an interview with a former professional fraudster. Read it, he talks about other popular fraud schemes in Canada.

Buying visas to Canada

I regularly, literally every week, get messages from vigilant subscribers trying to buy visas to Canada. Let me tell you right off the bat, visas are not for sale and we did an article on the subject.

But let me tell you briefly what the scam is about. People on ad sites, social networks, and regular websites find enticing ads that offer jobs in Canada. You don't need English, the pay is great, you get paid for your flight, accommodation, food, etc. Sounds very tempting.

If you apply, you can be scammed for money through a variety of options. The first option is that you will be asked to pay a nominal fee of USD 50 to 250 for your document review. From there they will simply stop answering you.

The second option — no advance payment is required, they ask to fill out long questionnaires, they even organize "interviews" with employers, and after a while, they talk about the need to pay a few thousand.

The third option is new to me. They ask for a USD 350 deposit upfront. You are signed up for biometrics, you give your passport to paste the visa. When the visa "will come out", they send a picture of it in the passport and then are asked to pay USD 8,000 minus the prepayment.

Most likely, the visas are fake. At least that is my impression after studying the documents on the company's website. I was able to get a good look at the company, but I couldn't find it in the registry of Canadian companies, and on the example of the visa there was a typo in the last name in one place.

Example of deception

I recently came across a very exemplary example of what happens when you go to some obscure companies to get a visa. In India, 700 guys contacted assistants in their town after graduation to get visas to study in Canada. A cunning Indian, the owner of this company, was charging the students — from USD 20,000. This cost included tuition and college fees. This is where it should immediately ring a bell that the amount is large. We also send students to study, but we only take money for our services. Clients pay for language school, college, or university tuition directly to the institutions.

But back to the India situation. This owner was "enrolling" clients at Humber, one of the largest colleges in Canada. The students were given enrollment letters from the college, based on which they successfully obtained student visas and went to Toronto. So far it seems that there is no catch and that the dream of a lifetime has come true: visas have been obtained, and people are already in Canada. But then came the surprises: when the students arrived in Canada, the owner of the company said that all the places in the college were taken, so they would either have to wait six months before the start of the new semester or enter another college. And, by the way, he even refunded their tuition. Apparently, he took all the commissions and fees. But I'm not going to say anything, I don't know that for sure.

It gets even more interesting. The students had already actually enrolled at another college, graduated, and even received a post-graduation work permit. But at the stage of applying for permanent residency, it was revealed that their first letter of admission, which went to Humber College, was forged. History is silent as to whether the students themselves knew this. But in the end, all of the company's clients, 700 of them, received deportation orders from Canada.

Let me remind you that they received visas and arrived in Canada based on a forged letter, which means that neither visa officers nor border guards suspected anything. The company ran this scheme from 2018 to 2022. Imagine how frustrating it is for those who got a visa 5 years ago, studied in Canada, spent a large sum of money, and now have to leave. And they couldn't even prove that this company they applied to was their agent, and they didn't know anything themselves.

Those work visas that are offered for USD 8,000 may be real, and not printed on a color printer in the basement of scammers. But here are obtained on false grounds, and this will lead to deportation in a few years.

My recommendation is that before you spend thousands of dollars to someone you don't know, contact a licensed Canadian immigration consultant. For example, our company already has several immigration consultants and we take cases of any complexity.

Alex Pavlenko, founder of Immigrant.Today