Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre: What Happens After You Report a Scam

What to take away

• Reporting a scam to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre is free, and most people finish the report in 15 to 30 minutes online or by phone.
• The spending starts afterwards. A Canadian household pays roughly $0 to $1,500 in the first year, mostly for credit monitoring, notarised documents, courier fees and bookkeeping.
• One-off costs are predictable, such as a notarised affidavit or a certified police file copy. Recurring costs are not, because monitoring renews monthly with no end date.
• The CAFC collects intelligence and shares it with police and regulators. It does not investigate your file, recover funds or give you a case status to track.

What the range covers

The range runs from the day you report to twelve months later, whether the loss was $300 or $300,000. Most people stay near the bottom. The CAFC report is free, a police report is free in most provinces, and a fraud alert on your credit file costs nothing.

Paid items cluster around proving who you are and watching for follow-on fraud. A notary, a courier, a monitoring subscription and a bookkeeper each charge for work the free route leaves with you. The figures below are illustrative ranges, not quotes, and posted prices change.

Small businesses sit at the top. When a loss traces back to a shared login or a departing employee, the paperwork is heavier. The pattern behind real account security incidents shows how fast those costs collect.

Line by line

Item	One-off or recurring	Illustrative cost (CAD)
CAFC report, online or by phone	One-off	$0
Police report, RCMP or municipal	One-off	$0 to $25 for a certified copy
Fraud alert placed with a credit bureau	One-off	$0
Credit monitoring subscription	Recurring, monthly	$15 to $30 per month
Notarised affidavit or sworn statement	One-off	$50 to $150
Registered mail or courier to a bank	One-off	$20 to $60
Mail-forwarding box after address misuse	Recurring, monthly	$15 to $30 per month
Bookkeeping and chargeback paperwork	One-off	$150 to $600

Add up the middle of that table and a careful household spends a few hundred dollars. Add a year of monitoring, a paid consultation and lost work hours, and the total passes $1,500. Interac e-Transfer losses follow the same free reporting route, and the RCMP's scams and fraud page explains where a bank's obligation ends.

Fixed against variable

Fixed costs can be priced before you start: the notary, the courier, the certified police copy, the bookkeeping hours. Ask for each price first, and none of them should surprise you.

Variable costs have no natural end. Monitoring renews until you cancel it. A lawyer charges by the hour for as long as the file stays open. Hours away from work are unlimited. That is the difference between a bill and a budget.

Provincial consumer protection offices sit in a separate lane and charge nothing. Consumer Protection BC, Service Alberta and Consumer Protection Ontario take complaints about contracts and sales practices, and some of them mediate.

What the tools do not include

A CAFC report is an intelligence filing. It is not a claim, not a case file and not a promise of follow-up.

Nothing you buy changes that. The CAFC assigns no investigator to your loss, freezes no accounts and refunds no money. There is no Canadian scam recovery process that returns funds automatically. Reports build a national picture that police and regulators draw on, and local police decide whether to act. Your bank decides whether to reverse a transfer.

Monitoring detects new accounts after they appear. It does not block them, and it does not clean your credit file for free. Software that scans messages for phishing sits upstream of the report; a guide to judging any phishing scam detection tool is more useful than buying on a promise.

If the harm came from a company losing your data rather than a stranger taking your money, the free route is a privacy complaint. The Office of the Privacy Commissioner's how to file a privacy complaint page sets out the steps.

Where budgets leak

• Ask your bank and card issuer what fraud monitoring they already include at no charge before you subscribe to anything.
• Ask the police service whether a certified copy of your file costs money, and whether a screenshot of the online confirmation will do.
• Ask your provincial consumer protection office whether it can take on the dispute without a fee.

The longest leak is renewal. People keep paying $15 to $30 a month for monitoring years after the fraudulent accounts were closed. Pick a cancellation date the week you subscribe and write it down.

Couriers are the second leak. Most banks accept a scanned document through a secure upload, so $40 to send a notarised affidavit across the country rarely speeds anything up.

The third leak is legal advice bought too early. Without a police file number, a lawyer is guessing. Where the loss crossed a border, Romance scam law explains why jurisdiction defeats most claims before a fee is earned.

Some losses that look like payments are account takeovers in progress. Account security warning signs are worth checking before you spend a dollar on monitoring you may not need.

Common questions

Does the CAFC give me a case number I can track? You get confirmation that a report was received, not an open case with a status. Files move to police services and regulators, and there is no public CAFC report tracking system to check later.

Will reporting get my money back? No. The CAFC does not recover funds. Your bank, your card issuer or a civil claim is the route to money, and the report supports those steps as evidence of the timeline.

How long does the report take? Online, most people finish in 15 to 30 minutes if they have dates, amounts, account numbers and messages to hand. Phone reports take longer on busy days.

Do I have to report to police as well? Not always, but it helps. A local police file number is what banks and insurers ask for, and it is free in most provinces. The CAFC passes information along; it does not replace your own report.