The Better Business Bureau has released their list of the riskiest forms of consumer fraud for 2017.    

The BBB says that during the year, consumers reported more than 47,000 scams to their "Scam Tracker."  The Bureau then analyzed that data using it's unique Scam Risk Index to determine the riskiest scams based on exposure, susceptibility and monetary loss.  Results were just released for March, which is Fraud Prevention Month in Canada.

Leah Brownridge, Media and Corporate Communications Specialist for the BBB in Southern Alberta and East Kootenay gives us the winner of the dubious honour of riskiest scam of the year.

"Our findings for 2017, the riskiest scam was the online purchase scam, and that involves a wide variety in and of itself.  It came in at number four in 2016 but now it's number one for 2017."

Brownridge says there are a couple of obvious reasons for the jump in the standing of online purchase scams.

"We saw a significant increase in the last year due to online pet scams, purchasing dogs, cats, other types of animals and pets online.  Unfortunately it really blew up last year and a lot of scammers were taking advantage of people who were wanting to adopt pets or purchase pets and thinking they're getting a good deal online but in reality what ends up happening is people are paying up front and then nothing ever arrives, they don't get the animal that they're looking for and they're told that they need to pay more money and more money for vaccinations and those kinds of things."

One other reason for the number of online purchase scams was an increase in "free trial offers," says Brownridge. 

"In particular we saw a lot of cases of people reporting they saw a lot of cases of "pop up" advertisements online, sometimes even popping up on reputable websites and advertising cosmetics, face cremes and things like that and advertising a free trial when in reality, it wasn't free.  People still had to hand over their credit card information for shipping and handling and thinking that the actual cost of the product was otherwise free.  They were unknowingly signing up for an automatic subscription service so every month they would receive new product and their credit card would be charged hundreds of dollars."

Other key findings included:

  • Young people continue to be at higher risk for scams 
  • Susceptibility decrease with age, although dollars lost increases when victims are older 
  • There was an increase in total scam reports, but overall susceptibility was down
  • There was a 17 percent decrease in the median monetary loss, down to $22

The top ten riskiest scams in 2017 were:

  1. Online purchase scams 
  2. Investment Scam 
  3. Employment Scam 
  4. Advance fee loan scam 
  5. Fake cheque scam 
  6. Home Improvement Scam 
  7. Tech support scam 
  8. Travel/vacation scam 
  9. Family/friend emergency scam 
  10. Government grant scam 

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