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Delta police are reminding the public that if you receive a phone call from a “government agency” that’s asking for payment in Bitcoin and threatening you with arrest, it’s a scam.
No government agencies ask for payment with Bitcoin, police say.
The DPD received three bitcoin specific fraud calls in one day last week. Two of the frauds involved callers claiming to be from the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) and one caller claimed to be from the DPD. Two of the frauds were completed and one was stopped by an alert taxi driver who was driving the victim to a Bitcoin machine.
“Some criminals prefer using Bitcoin because transactions are very difficult to trace,” the DPD said in a news release. “Chances are that if you send money via Bitcoin, you will never get it back.”
The DPD has provided residents with some tips to protect them from fraudsters posing as government workers:
* The government does not send you a text message when you owe money;
* The government will not pressure you to pay a fine in minutes or hours;
* The government does not accept payment in Bitcoin, gift cards or prepaid credit cards;
* Do not trust the number on your call display. Fraudsters may be using phone numbers that appear to come from the CRA or police, but these phone numbers can be easily mimicked by criminals through app technology;
* Don’t share more personal information, including banking information, over the phone.
