Methodology
How We Verify Fraud Warnings — RecoverFunds.ca Methodology
This registry documents companies that Canadian and international financial regulators have publicly warned about. This page explains exactly how an entry gets here, because a warning is only worth as much as the process behind it.
Every entry starts with a regulator, by name
We do not publish a company because someone told us it was a scam. Every company page in this registry is anchored to a published warning from a named financial regulator, and each page carries the issuing body, the date the warning was published, and a link to the original notice.
The bodies we source from include the Canadian Securities Administrators and its member commissions — the Ontario Securities Commission, the BC Securities Commission, the Alberta Securities Commission, the Autorité des marchés financiers in Quebec, the Financial and Consumer Affairs Authority of Saskatchewan, the Manitoba Securities Commission, the Financial and Consumer Services Commission of New Brunswick and the Nova Scotia Securities Commission — along with international regulators whose warnings concern operations that also solicit Canadians, principally the UK Financial Conduct Authority, ASIC in Australia and their counterparts in Europe.
The quotation rule
Each company page reproduces the regulator's own wording about that company.
That quotation is transcribed from the regulator's published notice. It is not paraphrased into quotation marks, and it is not reconstructed from memory or from a secondary report. If we cannot locate the regulator's actual wording for a company, we do not publish the page at all. This is an absolute rule in our publishing process and it is enforced before anything goes live.
The reason is simple. The value of this registry rests entirely on a reader being able to check what we say against the source. A plausible-sounding invented quote would be indistinguishable from a real one to a reader and would poison every other page on the site.
What we verify before publishing
- Identity. That the company named in the warning is the company we are describing, matched on the domain, the corporate name and any trading names. Legitimate businesses sometimes have names close to those used by fraudulent operations. Where identity is uncertain, we do not publish.
- The date and the issuing body, taken from the notice itself.
- Registration status, checked against the national registration search.
- Clone status. A large share of warnings concern operations impersonating a real, properly registered firm. On those pages we state plainly that the genuine company is not connected to the fraud, because the reputational harm of getting this wrong falls on an innocent business.
- Current behaviour, where victim reports submitted to us describe how the operation is running now. Reports corroborate and date the pattern; they are not the basis for the entry.
What we will not do
- We will not publish a regulator quotation we have not read on the regulator's own page.
- We will not state or imply that money can be recovered, or estimate a likelihood of recovery. Where recovery is possible we describe the mechanism honestly, and where it usually is not, we say that.
- We will not remove the warning about upfront-fee recovery scams from any page. It is the most common way a person who has already lost money loses more.
- We will not accept payment to add a company, to remove one, or to change what a page says. There is no paid placement anywhere on this site.
- We will not allege criminal conduct on our own authority. We report what regulators have published and what the documented pattern is.
Corrections and updates
Entries are reviewed and dated. Where an operation rebrands, changes domain or is superseded by a later regulatory action, the page is updated and the modification date changes with it.
If something on a page is wrong, we want to know, and the process for that is on our corrections policy page. Our broader standards for sourcing, independence and language are set out in the editorial policy, and the people who review this material are listed on the editorial team page.