Ontario Provincial Police say they have “busted” an organized crime group that allegedly used an emergency grandparent scam to defraud seniors across Canada out of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Details of the interprovincial investigation, dubbed Project Sharp, were announced at a news conference in Scarborough on Thursday morning.
The police said 56 charges have been filed against 14 suspectss, who were arrested in the Montreal area.
According to police, since January, investigators have identified 126 victims who were defrauded out of a total of $739,000. Fifteen of those victims were attacked on multiple occasions, police said, resulting in the loss of an additional $200,000.
Most of the Ontario victims
The victims, who range in age from 46 to 95, resided across the country, police said, adding that most were from Ontario.
According to investigators, four of the 14 suspects remain in custody while the other 10 have been released on bail. The charges they face include participation in organized crime groups, extortion, impersonating a police officer and fraud, police said.
OPP Det.-Insp. Sean Chatland told reporters on Thursday that the investigation began as an intelligence investigation in September 2022.
“It took us a significant period of time to really understand this group, understand how they operated and even just identify them,” Chatland said.
“Once we were able to identify this group, we immediately launched a criminal investigation.”
In February 2023, Chatland said the investigation was formalized as an OPP-led joint forces investigation involving Ontario and Quebec police services.
“This organized crime group demonstrated a deliberate and methodical approach in exploiting victims. They operated from Ontario and Quebec, using emergency grandparent scams with victims across Canada,” he said.
“They posed as police officers, judges, lawyers and loved ones, taking advantage of grandparents who believed they were trying to help family members in trouble.”
The victims had landlines.
Chatland said that in many cases, the suspects used “money mules” or couriers to collect large sums of money from victims.
The victims, he said, were targeted for the fact that they had landlines.
According to Chatland, the information the suspects used to defraud victims was publicly available on the Internet.
He said the impact on the victims of this case has been “devastating.”
“This investigation is much more than a fraud,” Chatland said. “This organized crime group affected victims across Canada in a way that will disrupt both the mental and financial lives of many.”
He said investigators have “worked closely” with financial institutions and the Canadian Bankers Association to recover more than half a million in losses.
‘Massively underreported’ fraud
Chatland said the OPP believes the group is responsible for more than $2.2 million in losses since the intelligence investigation was launched in 2022.
“That’s what we’ve been able to establish, but we suspect it’s probably higher than that,” he said.
He noted that the OPP believes that only five to 10 percent of all fraud cases are reported to police.
“Fraud is largely underreported,” he said. “A lot of it has to do with victimization, with blaming the victims and with people just feeling cheated. It is the nature of fraud.”