"An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure," according to Altona Police Chief Perry Batchelor who is offering up some tips on how we can all keep ourselves from becoming victims of fraud. March is Fraud Prevention Month in Canada.

He says the Canada Revenue Agency scam has been the most recent scenario that officers have been dealing with. "(Scammers are contacting people) through phone calls and threatening to put people in jail with warrants out for their arrest for being in arrears on their payments. It really did cause us some grief and created some victims in our community as well." At one point there were a dozen reports of the scam made to the Altona Police Service in one day.

And now, Batchelor points out this scam has morphed into an email campaign. "We did a release on that recently, warning the public on emails from the CRA and (about) opening links and entering bank information."

Batchelor adds, however, his office has become quite familiar with a few other scams as well such as the classified ad scam where customers offer to pay more for an item than the seller is asking but asks the seller to then send back that extra money via money order.

Then there's the PayPal scam. "Where they're sending out emails saying they're from PayPal," he explains, "letting you know that your accounts are at low capacity and you need to deposit some money into this account or enter your bank data."

He says Altona Police Service also continues to get victims of the romance scam.

The Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre describes this particular scenario where an individual with false romantic intentions towards someone earns their affection and trust (sometimes with the promise of marriage) and then gains access to the victim's money, bank account, credit cards or in some cases by getting the victims (usually unknowingly) to commit fraud on their behalf. According to the Centre, this scam was the highest grossing fraud in 2011 with over $12 million in losses reported by Canadians and has only gained popularity with the creation of social media and online dating sites.

"Through the romance scam thousands and thousands of dollars have been stolen out of the community, from our citizens," commented Batchelor.

He adds scammers are only as limited as their imaginations and says it feels like there is a new scam popping up every week. Case and point, the network operating the CRA scam out of Thane, India was taken down in early October when authorities in that country rounded up 70 people who were suspected of running the call-centre racket. However, Batchelor says a new version of the scam appeared shortly after. "They just re-invented it, dressed it up a bit differently, but one-hundred percent a scam."

As for how we can protect ourselves from being victimized, Batchelor says we should be on the look-out anytime and urges us not to give out personal information like bank data, dates of birth or even an address to someone we don't feel comfortable with.

"If you get a phone call or an email out-of-the-blue and you never started that transaction, don't give that information out (because) it can come back to haunt you in the future."

He notes it's also a good idea to log on to your bank account every once in a while just to make sure that nothing has suddenly gone missing or been charged to your credit card.

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