Since the creation of the internet in the 1980s, the world's criminal milieu has shifted away from hand-forged checks, pickpocketing and brazen bank robberies to more hushed – and often unseen – ways of illicitly fattening their wallets.
In January 2024, the Victoria Police Department found funding to operate the Cyber Crime Unit to combat the ever-growing and evolving world of online scams, frauds and criminal networks.
Sgt. Simon de Wit is the supervisor of the two-man unit, which includes another detective with specialties in digital forensics. De Wit says there are two main categories of cybercrimes they deal with: those where technology is targeted through hacking or data exfiltration, or those where technology is used to commit crimes, like fraud and scams – basically, any classical crime that has moved to computers, he said.
"Fraud has been around since the dawn of man; now it's just electronic fraud or online fraud," said de Wit.
In Victoria, some of the more prevalent types of online fraud and scams are investment and cryptocurrency scams, where victims are lured into fraudulent investment opportunities, and romance scams, where scammers on dating apps and social media manipulate victims into sending money.
"I've seen a lot of job and rental scams. Everybody knows that Victoria is a very expensive city to live in, so everyone's trying to do their best to make it," he said.
"Victims that see these fake listings for jobs, a lot of those jobs require the person to spend some money up front or deposit money to get access to the job ... We've seen victims spend hundreds of dollars or thousands of dollars and then actually not get paid."
According to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre (CAFC), last year Canadians reported losing over $310 million to investment fraud, while 90 to 95 per cent of fraud goes unreported.
Spear phishing and romance scams, which are often used in online investment fraud, are among the top ten reported frauds by the CAFC in 2024. That year, 23 per cent of Canadians said they were approached with a possible fraudulent investment, a five-point rise since 2020.
Earlier this month, VicPD announced the unit had recovered $80,000 in cryptocurrency stolen from a Victoria man. The unit tracked the stolen funds to a crypto exchange in South Africa, over 16,000 kilometres away.
"Crime knows no borders, right? And I think cybercrime has just taken that further, where now it has allowed criminals from all over the world to target victims from all over the world. They don't care about where their victims live, and cybercrime has allowed that to blossom," de Wit explained.
Using mostly publicly available, open-source information, the team tracked the funds' movement between digital wallets until it reached its final destination: the South African exchange.
Though the team got lucky and the exchange honoured a B.C. warrant to seize digital assets, countries that are hotbeds for crypto-related crimes do not need to legally comply with Canadian laws.
"A lot of [cryptocurrency exchanges] are based in China or the Seychelles or these weird islands all over the world that don't really comply with the law. A lot of the exchanges want to be legitimate, and a lot of them want to be seen as public-facing and cooperative with law enforcement because that gives them the illusion to many customers that the money is safe, which works well for us," he said.
Cybercrime is forever changing, he says, and scams come and go; however, he has noticed the weaponization of artificial intelligence and digital social engineering becoming increasingly common.
"Say you've got Facebook and it says your name and your date of birth, and you might think, 'OK, that's not too bad if somebody has my name and date of birth.' But if on another social media website you have your name and your phone number, and on the third website you maybe have your name and your address, by socially engineering all the data that you can gather from three, four, five, ten different websites, you can now create an entire profile of someone," he said, adding that most of this is done using AI.
By using the profile of an unaware victim, scammers can use that information to defraud businesses, banks, charities and even close family members.
"You have to be wary of what information is out there. And be really aware of 'Is this a legitimate call?' He concluded.
Those who think they may be victims of cybercrimes should call the E-Comm non-emergency line at 250-995-7654 extension 1, or visit the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre at antifraudcentre.ca.
