Monitor credit scores ‘vigilantly’ as identity fraud spikes: Expert

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A new Equifax Canada study said more than 76% of Canadians believe financial problems may increase identity fraud concerns.

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The report also said that while overall fraud rates have gone down slightly compared to the peak levels of 2022, the prevalence of identity fraud has increased.

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In the fourth quarter of 2023, identity fraud accounted for a staggering 75.21% of all fraudulent applications, up significantly from 64.7% in the previous year.

The biggest proportion was seen in the banking sector, where 73.5% of all fraudulent credit card applications and 89.3% of all deposit frauds in 2023’s third quarter were found to be because of identity fraud.

Bruce Sellery — the CEO of Credit Canada, the oldest non-profit credit counselling agency in Canada, and a personal finance expert on TV (Cityline) and radio (CBC) — was himself a victim of identify fraud about 18 months ago.

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“I track my credit score, I noticed it dropped 150 points suddenly,” said Sellery.

“I go through the report and see that there was a credit card approved by a major bank (which I had never banked at before). I called the bank and they say, ‘You applied for this credit card and we shipped it to you. We sent it to the branch in Brampton (I don’t live in Brampton), but you never picked it up. But because it had an annual fee on it, we reported that unpaid fee to the (credit) bureaus (Equifax Canada and TransUnion Canada).’ So it became immediately clear to me and them that that was fraud.”

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Sellery said it took eight months of paperwork and persistence to get the matter resolved.

“So basically the fraudster, all they needed was my name and address,” said Sellery “It’s quite ironic that someone could apply for a credit card with almost no evidence they were me and for me to reverse it was a Herculean task. You need to sign up for your free credit score and monitor it vigilantly. You need to look at that score every single month. Had I been in a position of renewing my mortgage, I would have been completely screwed.”

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Julie Kuzmic, Equifax Canada’s senior compliance officer in consumer advocacy, encourages consumers to protect their information, including using strong and unique passwords; being cautious of suspicious calls and emails; carefully disposing of sensitive documents like bank statements and credit card bills; and only sharing personal information and photo identification with trusted institutions.

For its study, Equifax Canada surveyed 1,614 Canadians between the ages of 18 and 65 from Feb. 2 to Feb. 4 with a probability sample of the same size yielding a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5%, 19 times out of 20.

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