Calgary Man Loses $8,000 in WhatsApp Job Scam

In collaboration with Equifax

Unfortunately for Roy B., the timing was right. He was out of a job and looking for work. He turned to social media, responding to ads in job groups and on Facebook marketplace. 

Roy received a direct message from someone telling him to use a WhatsApp link for a job opportunity.

“I never knew the person, but I thought since I was commenting on lots of job postings (maybe) that’s how they had gotten the contact information for me,” he says.

Through the WhatsApp link, he met someone who claimed they were from a digital agency looking for people like Roy who could review travel bookings in exchange for a commission. “They basically onboarded me right there,” he says. Roy was set up on a platform with a “mentor” to guide him through the first run of reviews and ratings.

To use the travel review platform, Roy had to set up a Newton crypto trading account and buy “credits”. Every time he did a review, it cost him credits but he would be paid back when he completed it plus commission. It seemed to be associated with a well-known travel agency. “For the first 20 reviews, whenever I was out of balance, my mentor would just fill up the balance with the balance in their account,” says Roy.

It didn’t make sense, says Roy. But he was stressed and not hearing back from the other jobs he was applying to so he kept paying for credits and doing reviews. “I just thought ‘I’m getting the payments so I can trust them,’” he says. Eventually, he transitioned from the mentor’s training account to his own.

But things started feeling a little off.

He was making some commission in his Newton account and converting it into Canadian dollars. But every time he finished a batch of reviews, the amount he had to pay for credits went up. “At the end of the day, after the commission, I was still in the negative,” says Roy, because the amount he had to pay for the credits kept rising.

Still, he was convinced it was legitimate. “There was a Telegram chat group,” says Roy. “Everybody’s posting after they’re done with the reviews and they’re getting their payout.” Then things changed.

High risk, no reward

It got to the point where he had to contribute $8,000 to continue. He was told it would be one of his last projects and he’d get all his money back. But when he completed it, the balance was gone again.

“I contacted the mentor to see what happened,” says Roy. “He was telling me I was too delayed, that I had one or two days but I took three or four… that’s why they’re giving me more – that’s when I understood it was a scam.”

He contacted the Calgary police to report it. All in, his losses were over $8,000. “They traced that money and told me some went to Ukraine and some to Nigeria,” he says. There was nothing else they could do. “That’s it. There’s no hope. It was a scam.”

Roy felt humiliated. The more he dug in, the more it all fell away. The Telegram group was fake. The digital agency didn’t exist. He called the travel company and they didn’t know what he was talking about.

Roy had been victimized by what’s known as a task scam – a convoluted job scam using a combination of fake chat groups and crypto to prey on people looking for work. It’s a phishing scam that has cost victims a collective $150 million, according to data from AI cybersecurity firm CloudSEK.

And for people like Roy who these scams have victimized, it’s an assault on perception, says Vanessa Iafolla, principal at Halifax-based Anti-Fraud Intelligence Consulting, which offers financial crime consulting and support for victims and lawyers.

“We as a species have evolved to believe our sensory experiences so if I see people saying something online, we think, yep, I can absolutely believe this because I can see this to be true,” says Iafolla. But with modern technology, it’s easy to create an imperceptible fake – a facsimile of a real space where “what you think is happening isn’t actually happening,” she says. “You’re just being duped.”

Iafolla says it’s the perceived “high-tech element” of the scam that really makes it work – the use of text groups and proprietary platforms, the crypto payments. “This is basically an employment or money-making scam, but it has all these little twists,” she says. “Because people are like, oh, I’ve never heard of this, the permutations are just enough that it becomes really difficult for people to think critically about what’s going on.”

Stop, drop, and roll

The challenge, says Iafolla, is these types of scams have so many variables that it can be easy to dupe a victim twice. She’s seen it first-hand with clients. There are so many variables that can be twisted to make a task scam seem legitimate, especially in an age when so many people are looking for side hustles or remote work.

Iafolla recommends people who have been victimized by these types of scams talk about the experience with someone – a counsellor or a close friend who could help them understand what happened. “Someone to help you better understand what to look for, like what’s a red flag – or maybe in some cases, a red banner – and what it is that made you susceptible at the time and how you can make yourself a little more impervious in future,” she says. “Build up the supports that already exist in your life.”

She also recommends visiting the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre and your financial services provider’s website to familiarize yourself with current scams and how to avoid them.

And finally, says Iafolla, in the future, if ever there’s something that you’re considering and it looks a little bit risky, or it seems like it might be too good to be true, or someone you don’t know wants your money – “stop, drop, and roll.”

“Stop, drop it, and then roll over to someone you know and trust in your real life that you can speak to face to face or on the phone and ask them what they think,” she says. “And do it again, talk to two people minimum.”

This is the second installment in the ‘Scamland Canada’ series, brought to you by Equifax. Through firsthand accounts, it aims to shed light on the cunning tactics of fraudsters, while offering strategies to help readers protect themselves against fraud and identity theft. One of those strategies is to subscribe to Equifax Complete™ Premier, a premium credit monitoring service that allows people in Canada to receive alerts directly from Equifax, to monitor their Equifax score daily, and to benefit from the help of an Equifax ID Restoration Specialist in the event that they fall victim to identity theft.