Reporting fraud to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre

What the CAFC is, the one thing it does not do, how to report, and the order to do things in if money has already moved.

Last reviewed 2026-07-26. Written for readers in Canada.

The Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre is a national police service jointly managed by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Competition Bureau of Canada and the Ontario Provincial Police. It operates out of North Bay, Ontario, and it is older than most people assume: it began in 1993 as PhoneBusters, set up in response to deceptive telemarketing.

The one thing the CAFC does not do

The CAFC does not investigate your case.It is Canada’s central repository for fraud and cybercrime intelligence. It collects reports, links them together, spots patterns across provinces and borders, and passes intelligence to the police service that does have jurisdiction. Investigation is the job of your local police.

This is the single most common misunderstanding about reporting fraud in Canada, and it changes what you should do. If you report only to the CAFC and not to your local police, nobody is investigating. If you report only to your local police, the national picture misses your case and the link to the twenty other people hit by the same operation is never made. Report to both.

How to report

Online: through the National Cybercrime and Fraud Reporting System at reportcyberandfraud.canada.ca. You can report as a victim or as a witness, and you can report anonymously if you prefer.

By phone: toll free on 1-888-495-8501, Monday to Friday, 10:00 to 16:45 Eastern time, closed on holidays. Those hours are narrow, so if you are calling from British Columbia the practical window is 07:00 to 13:45 local.

You do not need to have lost money. Reporting an attempt is useful precisely because it is the attempts, in volume, that reveal a campaign while it is still running.

What to have ready before you report

A report is only as useful as the detail in it, and most of that detail is easiest to capture in the first hour. Before you start the form, gather:

• The call itself: date, time and time zone, the number that appeared on your display, and any number the caller asked you to ring back. Note the display number even though it is probably spoofed — repeated use of the same spoofed number across many reports is exactly the kind of pattern the CAFC exists to find.
• What was claimed: the organisation the caller said they represented, any name or badge or agent number they gave, and the story used to create urgency.
• The money trail, if any: the payment method, amounts, dates, the receiving account, wallet address, or the retailer and serial numbers if you were sent to buy gift cards. Keep receipts and transaction references.
• Anything written: emails, texts, screenshots of the call log, and the full web address of any site you were directed to. Do not delete them, and do not reply to test whether the sender is real.

If you granted someone remote access to a computer or phone, say so explicitly in the report and treat every account reachable from that device as compromised. That is a materially different incident from a call you simply hung up on.

If money has already moved, the order matters

1. Your financial institution first. Contact the bank or institution that actually transferred the money, not just your own. Speed is the only lever that sometimes recovers funds, and it decays in hours.
2. Local police, and get a file number. You will need that number for insurance, for your bank, and for any credit bureau correction later.
3. The CAFC, online or by phone, so the intelligence reaches the national picture.
4. Federal agencies, where identity is involved. If your Social Insurance Number or CRA account is in play, contact the Canada Revenue Agency on 1-800-959-8281 and Service Canada on 1-800-622-6232.
5. Go back and update everyone as things develop. The CAFC asks for updates, and a report that gains detail is more useful than one filed and forgotten.

Why bother, when the odds on your own case are poor

It is worth being honest that an individual report rarely leads to an individual recovery. The value is aggregate. The CAFC states that reports can link crimes across Canada and abroad, can progress or complete an investigation already under way, and are what produce the trend data that police, banks and researchers use for prevention. The CAFC also works closely with the RCMP’s National Cybercrime Coordination Centre, sharing what you provide. Your report is a data point in someone else’s case as much as your own.

The intelligence also becomes public in aggregate. The CAFC publishes fraud reporting data through the Government of Canada’s Open Government Portal, so the reports feed published statistics as well as investigations.

If what happened feels too small to bring to the police, start with the CAFC. They can explain the reporting process and help you decide whether a police report is warranted.

Who else may need to hear about it

The CAFC is the intelligence destination, but it is not always the only one, and picking the right additional body depends on what the caller was actually doing:

• Deceptive marketing rather than outright fraud— misleading claims made to sell something — falls within the Competition Bureau’s remit, which is one of the three agencies that jointly manage the CAFC.
• A telemarketer breaking the calling rules — not identifying itself, ignoring a do-not-call request, calling outside permitted hours — is a CRTC matter, not a fraud matter. See telemarketing rules and the National Do Not Call List.
• A business mishandling your personal information goes to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, or your provincial commissioner in Alberta, British Columbia or Quebec. See your rights: caller data, privacy law and persistent callers.
• Credit and identity damage — contact Equifax Canada and TransUnion Canada to place a fraud alert on your file, and keep the police file number to hand when you do.

None of these replaces reporting to the CAFC, because none of them builds the national picture. They address the specific harm; the CAFC report addresses the operation.

For an immediate threat to safety, call 911 rather than any of the above.