How the RCMP busted the biggest fraud ever to target Canadians—and why they can’t keep up anymore.
We live in a golden age for fraud artists. Scams have become a relentless daily phenomenon. I receive a constant string of calls, emails and texts from fake employers, fraudulent courier services and strangely persistent duct cleaners. The financial toll has grown rapidly: in 2022, the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre received fraud and cybercrime reports totalling $530 million in victim losses, compared to $379 million the year before and $165 million the year before that. Law enforcement believe those are just a fraction of total losses; fraud is a drastically under-reported crime. In general, the RCMP is ill-equipped to stop this criminal activity, most of which originates overseas. But for a brief period starting in 2018, the force staffed up, mobilized and launched one of the most significant anti-fraud investigations in Canadian history. Its goal was to stop a single large-scale fraud operation: the CRA scam, whose perpetrators tricked targets into believing they owed unpaid taxes, and who are alleged to have called every phone number in Canada. In a new longform feature for Maclean’s, the reporter Sarah Trelevean chronicles the details of this investigation and then describes how, after stacking up a handful of victories, the effort was dismantled, leaving weary Canadians to once again fend for themselves. Visit macleans.ca for more coverage of everything that matters in Canada, and subscribe to the magazine here. —Sarah Fulford, editor-in-chief, Maclean’s |
In the summer of 2021, Williams Lake First Nation in B.C.’s Interior began investigating a local residential school that operated for almost a century, eventually uncovering accounts of torture, sexual abuse and starvation. A documentary following the inquiry was up for an Oscar on Sunday evening—making Julian Brave NoiseCat, who co-directed the documentary with Toronto’s Emily Kassie, the first Indigenous North American filmmaker to receive an Academy Award nomination. Maclean’s spoke to the co-directors about the story behind the film. |
Claire Brosseau suffers from crushing mental illness and wants to end her life on her own terms. But in 2023, the government stalled its plans to offer MAID to people like her. So she and the lobby group Dying With Dignity Canada launched a lawsuit arguing that withholding MAID from the mentally ill violates the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The case seeks to definitively answer the most fundamental question in the debate around MAID: who has the right to die? The ethics are muddy, the country is divided and the world is watching Canada’s next move. Read Luc Rinaldi’s feature story for a comprehensive look inside the crusade for psychiatric MAID. |
Buy one of these 100% made-in-Canada tote bags for just $25 each and you’ll be supporting the independent Canadian journalism Maclean’s has been doing for 120 years. |
Bestselling millennial author Scaachi Koul, author of the apathetic One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter, is alive and well and back with her follow-up, Sucker Punch. Koul, a former Buzzfeed writer who was born in Calgary, is known for her pithy yet cerebral deconstructions of even the lowest of pop-culture subjects (her long investigation into Girls Gone Wild, for example, is now a three-part documentary). Sucker Punch is a book of essays loosely based on her life’s fights—with friends, her parents, her ex-husband and anonymous trolls. Parasocial fans desperate for dirty details won’t be disappointed. |
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