Precautions

- Be cautious when asked to provide financial and personal information of any kind to anyone.

- Scammers may pretend to be from: your family, your bank, a utility company, an insurance company, a company you may do business with (for example, Amazon or Costco), a service provider (for example, duct cleaner, internet or mobile services), or the government.

- If you have concerns about the legitimacy of a request for personal or financial information, contact the organization, through their normal channels, before you respond.

Types of scams

- Telephone - you receive a phone call from enticing you to give financial and personal information. In many cases, scammers have a sense of urgency or tell you that you need to act immediately.

- Email - you receive an email from a scammer impersonating a known institution or business with a link or downloadable document that is designed to collect your financial and personal information. A useful way to identify a fraudulent link (whether by email, text or social media) is that they will lead website addresses with misspellings and grammatical errors (for example, a fraudulent link from Amazon.ca might lead to a website called Amzon.ca, or something similar).

- Text (SMS) - you receive a text message that asks for your financial and personal information through text messaging or to click a link that takes you to a website to try to collect your financial and personal information (such as your full name, date of birth, banking/credit card information). Note that it is extremely unusual for financial companies, the government or other institutions mentioned above to contact people by text. So, take particular care when receiving such requests.

- Social media - you receive messages on social media platforms pretending to be customer support asking you to share financial and personal information.

- QR codes - you receive a QR code, usually by email, that takes you to a malicious website designed to collect your financial and personal information.