Mounties make arrest in Oak Island fraud investigation

Oak Island falls victim to ticket scheme Oak Island, a popular Nova Scotia tourist destination is reeling after someone sold tickets for tours and pocketed the money.

The RCMP say an arrest has been made in a case of fraud affecting the Friends of Oak Island Society.

They confirm a man was arrested, and then released to appear in court at a later date - but they won't identify him or even say what charges he's facing.

The arrest comes after the Friends of Oak Island Society reported someone used a clone website to sell tickets for tours of Oak Island and pocketed the money.

In a Facebook post last week, the society said the alleged perpetrator is “no longer associated with Friends of Oak Island in any capacity.”

Lunenburg County's Oak Island is known for mysteries and curses; but the non-profit organization that oversees tours to the site says they never saw this twist coming.

“Initially it was like, ‘this probably just a one off kind of thing’,” Friends of Oak Island Society co-chair Judy Eisnor told CTV News earlier this week. “And then as it went further, it was shock.”

It started with e-mail that the Friends of Oak Island Society received about a tour booking that they didn’t recognize.

“After we put the booking number into our Eventbrite site and it didn’t come up, we contacted Eventbrite, and they told us there was actually an additional site, a clone of our site,” Friends of Oak Island Society co-chair Charles Barkhouse said.

The popular TV show ‘The Curse of Oak Island’ draws thousands of visitors for tours every year. The site has a display of artifacts and antiques associated with legends of buried treasure on the Island.