Fraud on the upward tick in Barrhead

BARRHEAD – Property crime may be on a downward trend, but fraud is on the rise, and there is no indication that it will slow down anytime soon.

In the last quarter, from January to March, the Barrhead RCMP opened 23 fraud files, up 28 per cent from the previous period last year and up 109 per cent from 2020.

And that is only the reported ones, said interim detachment commander Cpl. Filipe Vicente at the May 21 County of Barrhead council meeting.

“[Scams] are happening daily,” he said.

Vicente is visiting all the municipal councils the detachment serves. On May 11, he visited the Town of Barrhead council.

He related a story about someone who came into the detachment the previous day to report a scam.

“They got a phone call stating that their brother was in jail and needed money, and they conned into giving the scammer $16,000,” Vicente said.

Vicente said that, regrettably, that was not an isolated incident, adding that the detachment has received complaints about multiple “big money” scams in recent weeks and months.

“We have a file in Barrhead about a crypto scam with $200,000 in losses and a gift card scam with losses upwards of $70,000,” he said.

Unfortunately, Vicente said, these types of crimes are challenging to investigate and rarely come to a successful conclusion.

Coun. Paul Properzi asked if the fraud complaints were coming primarily from seniors.

“Seniors are being targeted a little more, but to be honest, people of all ages are falling victim to the scams,” Vicente replied. 

He added the incident where the person received a telephone call asking for money because a relative was in trouble and was in their 80s, while the crypto fraud victims’ ages ran the gambit.

Vicente said some of the frauds people have fallen victim to in the area are quite elaborate.

“A lot of the ads are on Facebook, and they use celebrity endorsements to reel people in,” he said. “When you send in your first $20,000, they provide you with a link to a website that looks like the stock market where you can watch your money grow. Then you send another $20,000, followed by another $10,000 and all of a sudden, you are out $200,000, and there is no getting it back.

Vicente said another scam that has been continuously making the rounds but has been on the rise recently uses Facebook Buy and Sell to target its victims.

“Scams where people are buying hockey tickets [through Facebook posts] realizing too late that it is not real,” he said, reiterating that often there is little police can do, especially when the scammers originate from outside the country. “The best weapon we have is to educate ourselves.”

Vicente said with the help of the Barrhead and Area Regional Crime Coalition (BARCC), the police have hosted multiple crime and scam prevention seminars, noting they would be holding another one as part of June 6’s senior expo at the Seniors’ Drop-in Centre.

BARCC is a partnership between Woodlands County, the Town of Barrhead, the County of Barrhead, the Barrhead RCMP and Rural Crime Watch.

It was formed in the spring of 2018, in part due to discussions Peace River-Westlock MP Arnold Viersen had with all parties to develop initiatives to combat rural crime.

New Detachment Update

Vicente said it would be quite some time before they break ground on the new RCMP detachment.

In February, he told county of Barrhead councillors that the construction of the new detachment building was to begin this spring, but the project has been delayed since then.

“The final drawings are supposed to be out sometime in June. It will then go through the tender process. By the time this is all done, it will be sometime in the fall, and the ground will be too frozen to start construction,” Vicente said.

Barry Kerton, TownandCountryToday.com