Montreal senior loses $80K after scammers posed as her bank using caller ID

A Montreal senior is warning of yet another phone scam, this time using caller ID, after she was targeted by fraudsters pretending to be bank agents.

A Montreal senior is warning of yet another phone scam, this time using caller ID.

Cassandra Schafhausen says she was contacted by her local RBC branch on March 13 flagging some high-end purchases made on her card totalling $25,000.

“He said, well, there’s an $18,000 and a $7,000 purchase. You didn’t do that? And I said, no. And he said, well, then we need to really move quickly,” she said.

What followed was a two-and-a-half-hour phone call. It ended with what she thought was a bank agent who came to her apartment to pick up her bank cards. By the time she realized something was wrong, the 81-year-old had lost more than $80,000. The thieves had cleaned out her savings and charged up her credit cards with purchases at Louis Vuitton and Mercedes.

She said she contacted the RBC Fraud line and went to her local branch to try and recover the money.

“Basically, once they heard that I had given them the pins and the passwords, as far as they were concerned, there really was really nothing to talk about,” she said.

Schafhausen said she’s devasted, emotionally and financially, and only gave over this information because the number that showed up on her phone was the same as her local RBC branch.

“It was calm. It was procedural. It was, I know it’s weird to say, but collaborative and, and I felt like I was doing this to achieve a goal of reversing $25,000 worth of charges,” she said.

Schafhausen isn’t the only person to fall for caller ID scams, according to Jeff Horncastle from the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre. He said in 2024, Canadians lost more than $17.5 million to criminals posing as bank investigators, though he said the number is likely much higher since victims often don’t report when they’ve been defrauded.

“We’re even getting reports where the fraudsters, the criminals, have personal information on the victim before they call,” adding that information from bank data breaches are sold on the dark web.

Horncastle said the best thing to do in a case like this is hang up the phone and call the number on the back of your bank or credit card to report what’s going on.

Schafhausen said she’s disappointed with the way RBC handled her case.

“There’s no recognition that this was a fraudulent experience that you had, that these people are incredibly sophisticated and even the most intelligent and aware of us can get trapped in this,” she said.

RBC told CTV News that it cannot comment on this particular case and reiterated that it does not ask for personal identification such as PIN codes over the phone. It said in any doubt, clients should only call the number on the back of their debit or credit card.