Reference
How to Report Investment Fraud in Canada (2026 Guide)
If you have sent money to an investment platform and cannot get it back, this page is the full process. It applies whether the platform was a fake forex broker, a crypto trading site, a romance investment scheme, a task scam, or a cold-calling boiler room.
Read it once, then work through it in order. The sequence matters more than the speed.
Do these four things first
1. Stop sending money. All of it.
This sounds obvious and it is the single hardest instruction to follow, because the platform will now do everything it can to extract one more payment. The demands are predictable. A withdrawal fee. A tax clearance. An anti-money-laundering deposit. An account upgrade to unlock the balance. A "liquidity" top-up to release a stuck trade.
None of these releases anything. There is no threshold you can reach. Every dollar sent after this point is simply lost on top of what came before, and Canadian regulators see it in case after case: the fees demanded after the withdrawal fails often exceed the original deposit.
If the balance on your dashboard is large, understand that the number is not money. On fraudulent platforms it is a figure in a database that the operator types in.
2. Do not delete anything, and do not confront them.
Your evidence is the account, the chat history, and the transaction record. If you accuse the operator of fraud, accounts get closed and chat logs disappear within hours. Screenshot first, then decide what to say. Ideally, say nothing.
3. Take the evidence out of their system and into yours.
Anything that lives only on their website or only inside their app can be revoked. Get copies onto your own device and back them up. The checklist is below.
4. Contact your bank or exchange the same day.
Timing genuinely affects outcomes here, and this is one of the few steps where speed can change the result.
- Paid by credit card: ask for a chargeback and use the words "goods or services not received" or "fraudulent merchant". Card networks generally allow 120 days from the transaction, and in some circumstances longer. This is the single most recoverable payment route.
- Paid by e-transfer or wire: call the fraud department, not the branch. Ask them to attempt a recall. Wires can occasionally be recalled if the receiving account has not been emptied.
- Paid in crypto from a Canadian exchange: report it to the exchange with the destination address. Canadian exchanges are regulated money services businesses and can flag addresses and file suspicious transaction reports. If the funds later reach an exchange that responds to law enforcement, a flagged address is what makes a freeze possible.
- Bought crypto at an ATM or peer-to-peer: report to the operator anyway, and keep the receipt.
What evidence to collect
Collect this before you file anything, because every one of the reports below will ask for it, and you only want to assemble it once.
- Every transaction record: dates, amounts, currency, and the receiving bank account, wallet address or exchange
- Blockchain transaction IDs for any crypto payment, and the wallet addresses you sent to
- Your bank or card statements showing the payments leaving
- Screenshots of the platform: your dashboard, your balance, the withdrawal screen, and any error or fee demand
- The full chat and email history with anyone who contacted you, including WhatsApp, Telegram, WeChat, Instagram and SMS, exported rather than screenshotted where possible
- The names, phone numbers and email addresses used by the account manager, and any photo or profile they used
- The website address, including any variants, and any app you were asked to install
- Any documents they sent: contracts, statements, certificates, licences, tax notices
- A short written timeline of what happened, in order, from first contact to now
Two notes on this. Export chats rather than screenshot them where the app allows it, because an export preserves timestamps and phone numbers that a screenshot crops out. And write the timeline while it is fresh; it becomes the backbone of every report you file and you will be asked for it repeatedly.
Who to report to
There are three separate reporting channels in Canada and they do different things. File with all of them. None of them substitutes for the others.
The Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre
The CAFC is the national intake point for fraud reporting. It is jointly operated by the RCMP, the Competition Bureau and the Ontario Provincial Police. Filing here puts your case into the national dataset that supports enforcement work and feeds public warnings.
- Online at antifraudcentre.ca
- By phone at 1-888-495-8501
The CAFC does not investigate individual cases or recover money, and it will tell you so. File anyway. Fraud is dramatically under-reported in Canada, which distorts every downstream decision about where enforcement resources go.
Your provincial securities regulator
Securities regulation in Canada is provincial. Your regulator is the one that can act against an unregistered platform soliciting residents of your province, and it is the body that issues the public investor alerts this registry is built on.
- Ontario — Ontario Securities Commission (OSC), osc.ca, 1-877-785-1555
- British Columbia — BC Securities Commission (BCSC), bcsc.bc.ca, 604-899-6854 or toll-free 1-800-373-6393
- Alberta — Alberta Securities Commission (ASC), asc.ca, 1-877-355-4488 or 403-297-6454
- Quebec — Autorité des marchés financiers (AMF), lautorite.qc.ca, 1-877-525-0337
- Saskatchewan — Financial and Consumer Affairs Authority (FCAA), fcaa.gov.sk.ca, 306-787-5645
- Manitoba — Manitoba Securities Commission (MSC), mbsecurities.ca, 204-945-2548
- New Brunswick — Financial and Consumer Services Commission (FCNB), fcnb.ca, 1-866-933-2222
- Nova Scotia — Nova Scotia Securities Commission (NSSC), nssc.novascotia.ca, 902-424-7768
If you are in Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland and Labrador, Yukon, the Northwest Territories or Nunavut, the Canadian Securities Administrators maintains the current contact route for every jurisdiction at securities-administrators.ca.
Report to the regulator for the province you live in, not the province or country the platform claims to operate from. Where the platform claimed to be is usually fictional, and your own regulator is the one with jurisdiction over the solicitation that reached you.
Your local police
File a report and get the file number. Police forces vary widely in how they handle online investment fraud, and a single victim reporting alone rarely triggers an investigation. What changes that is volume: when several reports naming the same platform reach the same force, the case becomes viable. Your report is what makes someone else's report count.
You will need the file number later if a civil claim, an insurance question or a class action ever arises.
What happens after you report
An honest account, because the gap between what people expect and what actually happens is where the second wave of scams operates.
Most reports do not lead to money coming back. Funds sent to offshore accounts or converted to crypto are usually moved within hours through exchanges and mixing services outside Canadian jurisdiction. Regulators can issue warnings, ban operators from the market, and pursue enforcement, but they are not a recovery mechanism and they do not have a fund that reimburses victims.
Recovery does happen, and it is worth understanding when. It happens most often through payment reversal — a chargeback, a recalled wire, an exchange freeze on funds that had not yet moved. That is why the same-day bank contact above matters so much. It happens occasionally through enforcement, when authorities seize assets and a distribution follows, which typically takes years. And it happens sometimes through civil action where an identifiable Canadian party is involved and has assets.
What does not work is paying someone to get it back for you.
The recovery scam that targets people who have already been defrauded
This warning is on this page, on every company page in this registry, and it will stay there, because it is the most reliable way people lose a second amount of money.
Anyone who contacts you promising to recover your funds for an upfront fee is running a second scam. The pattern is well documented by Canadian regulators. Often it is the same operation coming back with a different name, working from the list of people they already know have money and have already shown they will pay.
The tells are consistent:
- They contacted you, often within weeks of the original loss
- They ask for a fee, a retainer, a "legal deposit", a "tax", or a "release payment" before anything happens
- They guarantee results, or quote a percentage they will recover
- They claim to be able to reverse blockchain transactions, which is not something any private company can do
- They present themselves as working with a regulator or law enforcement, which those bodies do not do
- They ask for your wallet recovery phrase or private keys, which is a request to empty your wallet and nothing else
No legitimate organisation asks for a recovery phrase. RecoverFunds.ca will never ask you for a recovery phrase, a private key, or remote access to your device, and no regulator or police force will either.
Be equally careful with unsolicited "asset recovery" firms, "blockchain forensics" outfits and "cyber-investigators" that appear in your inbox or in search ads after you have posted about a loss anywhere public.
If you are not sure whether you were scammed
Two checks resolve most cases.
Check registration. Anyone selling securities or derivatives to Canadians must be registered in the province where the client lives, with very few exceptions. Search the free national database at aretheyregistered.ca. If the platform is not there, it is not permitted to take your money, regardless of any licence number displayed on its site. Licence numbers on scam platforms are routinely copied from real firms.
Check the warning lists. The Canadian Securities Administrators publishes investor alerts, and each province publishes its own. This registry tracks those alerts. Search the company name, and also search the domain, because operations rebrand frequently while keeping the same infrastructure.
A platform that will not let you withdraw, that adds a new fee every time you try, that has an account manager pressing you to deposit more, or that only accepts crypto, is exhibiting the pattern regardless of what any list says.
Reporting to RecoverFunds.ca
We are an independent registry, not a government body and not a recovery service. We do not charge for a case review and we do not take a percentage of anything.
What a report to us does: we tell you which regulator has jurisdiction in your case and what they will need from you, we tell you which payment routes are still reversible based on how and when you paid, and we add the case to the registry so the platform is documented for the next person who searches it. Where a company already appears here, your report adds to what we know about how it is currently operating, which is often the thing that lets us keep an article accurate as the operation changes tactics.
What we cannot do: guarantee a recovery, act as your lawyer, or reverse a blockchain transaction. Nobody can do the last one.
Reports go to the case review form. If you would rather read first, the registry of flagged companies is public and searchable, and our verification method explains how each entry gets there.