Suspicious sounding survey concerns consumer

CTV Calgary: Stats survey stumps consumer With all the scams on the scene would you answer a survey that asked how much money you make? Lea Williams-Doherty checks it out.

A phone survey that sounds a bit suspicious is actually legitimate but how do you know which ones are real and which ones are a scam? Consumer Watch has the scoop.

Mike Staveley says callers claiming to work for Stats Canada filled up his voicemail while he was down south for the winter demanding he answer a mandatory survey that they said his wife committed him to in November.

"Well of course that's a lie because we were in Palm Springs at that point," said Staveley.

He dismissed the calls as the work of con artists but when they kept hounding him he says he relented and answered a few harmless questions.

The caller then asked personal questions about his income sources and past income tax filings and that’s when Staveley got suspicious.

"And I said if I don't answer are you gonna put me in jail?  No but we have other sanctions that we can use against you,” said Staveley. “At this point I think it's a total scam, I think somebody's trying to contact me and try and get information from me illegally."

Staveley hung up and called CTV Consumer Specialist Lea Williams-Doherty to find out if it really was a call from Statistics Canada.

Lea says that the only mandatory survey she had ever heard about was the census, so she called Stats Canada to find out if this is for real.

It turns out that there is one other mandatory survey Stats Canada performs.

"This is a big survey, it’s 110,000 respondents every month,” said Alison Hale from Stats Canada.

The Labour Force Survey is completed by 1.3 million Canadians every year and is a monthly snapshot of the state of the economy and employment.

The government uses it to make decisions about things such as interest rates and employment insurance.

Lea says that with all the scams and identity theft schemes that are going around, people like Staveley should be wise and leery of giving a stranger personal financial information.

She also says that Statistics Canada does have the power to fine or jail those who refuse to answer but it is rarely exercised.

"In a few cases for the census, once we've made every effort to try to have respondents to reply to a survey, it does go forward for legal action,” said Hale.

Statistics Canada maintains a list of active surveys on its website, click HERE for more info.