Fake Amazon calls are the top Canadian phone scam: study

Canadians most frequently obtain rip-off calls associated to Amazon, in keeping with a brand new international research.

Compiled by Seattle-based Hiya, a telephone rip-off monitoring firm, the ‘This autumn 2024 International Name Menace Report’ examined name fraud throughout quite a lot of international locations and highlighted the rising menace of AI-generated deepfake voice scams. A key knowledge level analyzed by the research centred across the variations within the sorts of scams that every nation continues to face.

For Canada, telephone calls impersonating Amazon had been the dominant sort of rip-off and virtually twice as frequent because the second commonest sort of rip-off right here total: fraudsters impersonating telecom companies.

The complete listing of varieties of frequent telephone scams in Canada is as follows:

1. Amazon
2. Telecoms
3. Supply corporations (Canada Submit, FedEx, and many others)
4. Social insurance coverage
5. Chinese language language
6. Bank card
7. Crypto buying and selling
8. Insurance coverage

In contrast, the commonest U.S. telephone scams had been, so as, associated to medicare, tax and insurance coverage.

Canadians had been among the many greatest cash losers on AI-generated deepfake voice scams, in keeping with Hiya. The typical sum of money misplaced by Canadians to a telephone rip-off was $1,479, increased than everybody save France, which noticed a median lack of €1,089 (roughly CA$1,623). The U.S. misplaced a median of US$539.

Canadians get fewer common rip-off calls than Individuals

Elsewhere, the research discovered that Canadians have a month-to-month common of six spam calls, which is nicely beneath the 15 that Individuals obtain each month. Nevertheless, Canada’s proportion of fraud calls, 9 p.c of all incoming calls, is way increased than the one p.c reported within the U.S.

Past that, Hiya discovered that 20 p.c of calls Canadians obtain are of the “nuisance” selection, which the corporate defines as these from the likes of telemarketers, politicians, and pollsters. By comparability, 30 p.c of incoming calls to Individuals are thought-about nuisances.

In whole, Hiya reported 11.3 billion spam calls world wide in This autumn alone. It must be confused, in fact, that this research being from This autumn 2024 signifies that it took under consideration the busier vacation season, a very rampant time for scammers. That stated, it’s nonetheless attention-grabbing to see this form of knowledge, particularly with respect to the varieties of scams that appear to recur in Canada, particularly.

Hiya says its This autumn 2024 International Name Menace Report relies on a consultant pattern of calls noticed on the Hiya Voice Intelligence Community, which incorporates Samsung Good Name-enabled gadgets and the Hiya mobile app. The report additionally incorporates insights from a January 2025 survey of 12,000 customers throughout the U.S., Canada, the U.Ok., Germany, France, and Spain.

Extra info on the way to determine and defend your self from every kind of scams, in addition to the way to report suspected cases of fraud, may be discovered on the Government of Canada’s website.