Thirty-eight percent of newcomers to Canada say they have been hit by at least one fraud, more than double the 17 percent rate among other Canadians, according to Scotiabank's 2024 Fraud Poll. The Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre logged $704 million in reported losses in 2025, up from $638 million the year before, with the Competition Bureau noting that only 5 to 10 percent of incidents are reported in the first place.
The published ledger is the visible tip of a much larger exposure, and the underreporting concentrates in a cohort that Canadian fraud-prevention infrastructure was not designed around.
The 38 percent figure tracks newcomers to Canada in the most procedurally exposed window of their lives here: working through unfamiliar banking, regulatory authorities, and housing and employment markets in their first 12 to 24 months. Tammy McKinnon, Scotiabank's Senior Vice President of Global Fraud Management, framed the survey's central finding directly: "When it comes to financial fraud, everyone is a target, particularly individuals who may be in vulnerable positions such as newcomers to Canada."
A separate 2023 Interac survey sharpens the picture: 70 percent of newcomers feel more susceptible to scams than the general population, 53 percent say they or a family member have been targeted, and only 22 percent would know how to respond. The 5 to 10 percent reporting gap is not evenly distributed; the cohorts that lack language access or trust in reporting channels are the ones the loss ledger underrepresents.
So, $704 million is what gets reported. Actual exposure is a multiple of that, sitting inside a population the apparatus does not segment for.
CAFC vector data and FINTRAC operational alerts converge on three typologies that concentrate on newcomer targets. None are unique to newcomers, but each weaponizes friction points recent arrivals experience at higher rates.
Authority impersonation: CRA, IRCC, and Service Canada
The CAFC tracks extortion calls impersonating government agencies as one of the highest-volume vectors targeting Canadians. Operators claiming to be from the Canada Revenue Agency, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, or Service Canada threaten arrest, deportation, or status revocation unless the recipient pays an alleged debt by gift card, cryptocurrency, or wire transfer. CISA-tracked variants extend into phone scammers impersonating federal-agency employees, sharing infrastructure with Canadian operations.
A long-tenure resident knows the CRA does not call to demand gift-card payment. A recipient who arrived six months ago often does not, an awareness gap documented in CRA's fraud communications.
Settlement-workflow scams: fake jobs, fake rentals, fake consultants
Settlement scams piggyback on the workflow a newcomer has to complete in their first months. Fraudulent rental listings demand first-and-last month's rent before the prospective tenant has seen the unit, then disappear once the wire clears. Fake employers conduct sham interviews and request banking credentials or upfront equipment fees. Unlicensed immigration consultants charge for services they cannot legally provide; the licensing college is the only body authorized to license them, yet unlicensed operators advertise heavily in newcomer-facing channels.
Per-incident exposure is often larger here than in authority-impersonation hits. A fraudulent rental can cost a family several thousand dollars in displaced deposits. A fraudulent employment scheme can lead to money-mule conscription, where the newcomer's account becomes a transit point for laundered funds. FINTRAC's suspicious-transaction indicators flag the patterns inside the bank, not on the customer's phone.
Investment and "pig-butchering" schemes via diaspora messaging apps
The third vector is the fastest growing in dollar terms. Romance and investment scams, including the typology commonly called pig butchering, accounted for the largest share of CAFC-reported losses in 2024. The pattern relies on long-form rapport built over messaging apps before the financial ask materializes. Diaspora messaging communities are a high-yield acquisition channel: the social trust signals that protect long-tenure residents are thinner for someone who arrived 14 months ago. Small initial transfers establish a transactional rhythm, the larger investment ask follows, and the funds move before the cohort-level signal reaches the bank.
Bank fraud-detection models lean on transaction-pattern baselines: typical merchants, counterparties, and geographic footprint. SecureWorld has covered how machine learning baselines treat normal activity as the reference point and flag deviations as potential fraud. That works for a customer with three years of stable behavior. For a newcomer in month four, the model has no baseline; everything reads as a deviation, signal-to-noise collapses, and two failure modes follow. Legitimate transactions get flagged, friction accumulates, analysts deprioritize the segment. Or actual fraud gets buried inside the same noise floor.
The thin-file problem compounds this. Equifax newcomer research documents that recent arrivals carry no Canadian credit history for the first several months, leaving identity-verification models without an anchor. LexisNexis fraud-loss analysis finds a substantial share of total fraud loss occurs during account opening. The highest-risk window for newcomers is the precise window where bank defenses have the least signal.
FINTRAC's suspicious-transaction reporting threshold flags deviation from an established profile, which again presupposes one. Language access compounds the problem: the CAFC's reporting portal operates primarily in English and French, with limited intake in the other languages newcomers most often arrive speaking.
The infrastructure was built for a long-tenure customer base and works well for that base. The gap sits between the model's assumptions and the demographic shape of who is being targeted.
Three program-design moves would close the largest part of the gap. Each is testable against a metric a fraud-operations team can actually move.
Cohort-aware detection thresholds
Treat thin-file and recent-arrival profiles as their own segment with their own baseline expectations, rather than running them through general-population anomaly models. The LexisNexis account-opening finding is the practical anchor: weight the first 90 to 180 days differently and lean on alternate identity signals (telecom, rental, utility) that TransUnion's newcomer programs already supply. Measure by false-positive rate on legitimate transactions and true-positive rate on first-90-day fraud attempts.
Multi-language reporting flows
The 5 to 10 percent reporting rate is the number to move. Expanding bank and CAFC intake into the top non-official languages spoken by recent arrivals directly addresses the underreporting concentration. Measure by reporting rate among newcomer-cohort incidents against the general-population rate.
Cross-institutional intel sharing on diaspora-targeted typologies
Individual bank fraud teams see fragments of each typology; they rarely see the full pattern crossing six institutions in a week. SecureWorld has covered the FS-ISAC partnership with the Cyber Threat Alliance as one such pipeline. Extending that model to carry CAFC and FINTRAC signals on newcomer typologies back to bank fraud-ops in near-real-time would let cohort-level signals get acted on at speed.
Each move is incremental, not infrastructural, and none requires new regulation. They require a fraud-program owner to name the cohort and instrument the work against it.
As long as fraud-prevention infrastructure treats newcomers as anomalies inside a general-population model rather than as a named cohort with their own typology, the published loss number will keep understating exposure. The 38 percent victimization rate Scotiabank found in 2024 will not surface in the CAFC's annual total without intake infrastructure that segments for the cohort generating it.
The most actionable next step is also the smallest. Pull the last 24 months of fraud cases and count how many involved customers in their first 24 months in Canada. The answer is the program brief.