Fraud numbers get quoted loosely, so this page does the opposite. Every figure below is taken from a primary source: the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre's own statistical reporting, Statistics Canada's police-reported crime data, securities regulators, and the Insurance Bureau of Canada. Each claim carries a numbered source, each source is linked in full at the bottom, and the page is dated so you can tell exactly how current it is. Where a number is an estimate or a snapshot, we say so, because the honest caveats are part of the picture.
What Canadians reported losing, 2020 to 2025
The Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre is the national repository for fraud reporting, operated by the RCMP with the Competition Bureau and the Ontario Provincial Police. Its reported-loss figures have risen every single year since 2020, more than quadrupling over five years to a record high in 2025.[1][2]
| Year | Reported losses, all reporting | Reported losses, Canadian victims |
|---|---|---|
| 2020 | $165M | $107M |
| 2021 | $389M | $285M |
| 2022 | $534M | $423M |
| 2023 | $578M | $461M |
| 2024 | $644M | $492M |
| 2025 | $704M+ | Not yet published |
Two details make the trend worse than it looks. First, the number of reports is not rising with the losses: the CAFC logged 108,878 reports in 2024 and over 112,000 in 2025, roughly a third fewer than the pandemic peak, yet the dollar losses keep climbing.[1][2] Fewer reports, more money gone, means the frauds that do land are bigger. The average reported loss per victimization in 2024 was $18,071.[1] Second, these are point-in-time snapshots: the CAFC processes reports on a delay and revises figures as the backlog clears, so published numbers for a given year can shift slightly between snapshots. The 2020 to 2024 series above comes from a single report so the years are comparable.[1]
Where the money went: the costliest frauds
Ranked by dollars rather than complaint volume, one category dominates. Investment fraud accounted for roughly 49 per cent of all reported losses in 2024, and the average hit per victimization was $78,309, which is not a nuisance crime, it is a life-changing loss.[1] The CAFC's full 2024 ranking:[1]
| Fraud type, 2024 | Reported loss | Average loss per victimization |
|---|---|---|
| Investment | $313.1M | $78,309 |
| Spear phishing (business reporting) | $67.3M | $107,415 |
| Romance | $58.9M | $55,697 |
| Job | $48.2M | $21,103 |
| Extortion | $21.1M | $22,133 |
| Service | $20.6M | $5,211 |
| Bank investigator | $17.1M | $11,309 |
| Merchandise | $9.9M | $2,380 |
| Recovery pitch | $9.2M | $28,213 |
| Vendor fraud | $8.3M | $15,698 |
2025 continued the pattern: investment fraud grew to $351 million, followed by spear phishing at $67.9 million, relationship fraud at $63.3 million and job scams at $50.6 million.[2] By complaint volume the most-reported category is identity fraud, with 9,683 reports in 2024 and 8,403 in 2025, though its per-victim dollar losses are smaller.[1][2]
Two categories on that table deserve a flag because they impersonate people like us. "Bank investigator" fraud, where a caller pretends to be a bank or government investigator, took $17.1 million in 2024, and "recovery pitch" fraud, where someone contacts an existing fraud victim promising to recover their money for a fee, took another $9.2 million from people who had already been victimized once.[1] A real investigator can be verified before you engage them; we explain exactly how in our licence-verification guide.
Ontario's share
Ontario files more fraud reports than any other province and carries the largest losses. In 2024, Ontarians filed 15,855 reports with the CAFC, with $219.1 million in reported losses, which is nearly half of the roughly $492 million reported by Canadian victims that year.[1] Ontario's three costliest categories mirror the national picture, with a notably heavy spear-phishing toll on businesses:[1]
| Fraud type, Ontario 2024 | Reported loss | Average loss per victimization |
|---|---|---|
| Investment | $102.7M | $82,953 |
| Spear phishing | $39.6M | $193,296 |
| Romance | $19.2M | $70,779 |
The reporting gap: the real number is much larger
The most important fraud statistic in Canada is the one that measures what the statistics miss. The CAFC estimates that only 5 to 10 per cent of fraud is ever reported to it.[3] Canada's securities regulators and the RCMP state the same estimate from the other direction: 90 to 95 per cent of fraud goes unreported.[4] Statistics Canada attaches the same caveat to police-reported figures.[5]
Taken at face value, that reporting rate implies that the $704 million reported in 2025 sits somewhere on top of several billion dollars in actual annual losses. That extrapolation is arithmetic, not an official figure, but the direction is not in dispute: every agency that collects these numbers describes them as a floor. The reasons are human ones. Fraud victims stay silent out of embarrassment, out of self-blame, and often because they are still not certain they were defrauded at all. Silence is part of the business model.
Police-reported fraud: the longer trend
Statistics Canada counts fraud differently, through incidents reported to police rather than victim reports to the CAFC, and the long trend points the same way. The police-reported fraud rate, counting general fraud plus identity theft and identity fraud, was 492 incidents per 100,000 population in 2025. That was 4 per cent lower than 2024, but 61 per cent higher than a decade earlier.[5] Extortion tells a sharper version of the same story: 29 incidents per 100,000 in 2025, down 10 per cent for a second consecutive annual decline, yet still more than three times the 2015 rate of 9 per 100,000.[5]
Insurance fraud
Insurance fraud runs on a separate track from the CAFC's consumer-fraud reporting and lands on everyone's premiums. The Insurance Bureau of Canada's standing estimate is that insurance fraud costs Canadians well over $1 billion a year in added insurance premiums, through staged collisions, exaggerated or false claims, and repair and towing schemes.[6] It is also the fraud category where licensed investigators do the most day-to-day work in Ontario, documenting insurance claims and WSIB claims to an evidentiary standard that holds up at adjudication.
Patterns worth knowing
- Cyber-enabled fraud accounted for $481.6 million of 2024's reported losses, three quarters of the total. Most Canadian fraud now arrives through a screen.[1]
- Seniors carried 27.9 per cent of 2024's reported dollar losses, and people over 50 lose more per fraud on average, while people under 50 are victimized more often.[1]
- Cryptocurrency is the payment channel of choice for investment, job and romance frauds, averaging $23,815 per reported transaction in 2024.[1]
- 23 per cent of Canadians say they have been approached with a potentially fraudulent investment, up five points since 2020, and 46 per cent of those approached encountered it on social media.[4]
- The fastest-growing 2024 categories were bank-investigator impersonation, up 16.5 per cent in victimization, and job scams, up $17 million on the back of "task-driven" fake-work schemes.[1]
If you have been defrauded
Report it even though most people do not. Call your bank first, because speed matters most on wires and transfers. Get a local police occurrence number. Then report to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre at reportcyberandfraud.canada.ca or 1-888-495-8501, and preserve everything: profiles, chat history, transaction records, wallet addresses.
On what an investigator can honestly do: we can verify who you were actually dealing with, document the evidence trail while it still exists, and build the package a lawyer or police need to act, the way we describe in our field note on romance and investment fraud. What no legitimate investigator will do is promise to get your money back for an upfront fee. That exact promise is the "recovery pitch" fraud in the table above, and it specifically hunts people who have already been defrauded once.
Methodology
Figures on this page were verified against the linked primary sources on August 7, 2026, and are updated annually or when a source publishes new data. CAFC figures are point-in-time snapshots of processed reports and are revised as backlogs clear; reported losses understate actual losses for the reasons covered in the reporting-gap section. Nothing here is an estimate of ours; where a source estimates, we attribute it.
Frequently asked questions
How much money do Canadians lose to fraud each year?
Canadians reported more than $704 million lost to fraud in 2025, the highest figure on record, across more than 112,000 reports to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre. Reported losses have risen every year since 2020, when the figure was $165 million. Because the CAFC estimates only 5 to 10 per cent of fraud is ever reported, the true annual figure is far higher.
What is the most costly type of fraud in Canada?
Investment fraud, by a wide margin. It accounted for $313 million of reported losses in 2024, roughly 49 per cent of all reported fraud losses that year, and grew to $351 million in 2025. The average reported loss per investment-fraud victimization in 2024 was $78,309. Romance fraud, spear phishing and job scams follow.
What percentage of fraud is actually reported in Canada?
The Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre estimates only 5 to 10 per cent of fraud is reported, and securities regulators and the RCMP put it the other way: 90 to 95 per cent of fraud goes unreported. Statistics Canada makes the same caveat about police-reported figures. Shame and embarrassment keep most victims silent, which is exactly what fraud operations count on.
Sources
- Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, 2024 Annual Statistical Report (data as of February 19, 2025). Accessed August 7, 2026.
- Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, Top 10 frauds in 2025. Accessed August 7, 2026.
- Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, 2022 Annual Report (reporting-rate estimate). Accessed August 7, 2026.
- Canadian Securities Administrators, CAFC and RCMP, joint release on investment fraud, March 13, 2025. Accessed August 7, 2026.
- Statistics Canada, The Daily: Police-reported crime statistics in Canada, 2025, July 22, 2026. Accessed August 7, 2026.
- Insurance Bureau of Canada, Vigilance is key in fighting insurance fraud, March 2021. Accessed August 7, 2026.