Quote Originally Posted by jakebrake View Post
I got scammed a few year ago on a gun I bought from firearms canada site the rcmp have bigger fish to fry,they don't care about these scammers.some of these scammers get away with tens of thousands of dollars worth of scams a year with no repercussions.I never heard of anyone getting thier money back.What needs to happen is give these guys a one year mandatory jail sentence that will make them think twice.
It has nothing to do with "bigger fish to fry", it has to do with the fact the offender and victim are in entirely different jurisdictions and it is all but impractical to prosecute.

If the fraud is under $5000 then it will be treated as a summary offence (which puts it in the same category as stealing a pack of gum from your local corner store).

If that offence occurs across Provincial jurisdictions, good luck getting a Crown to prosecute.

If it ever went to court there is no way in hell the Crown (us taxpayers) is willing to pay to bring the victim to court across the country to face the accused for an item under $5000 that will see essentially a slap on the wrist (because a summary offence property crime is worth not much more than a fine or community service in the grand scale of offences and punishments in our "justice" system).

If the accused leaves the area (which they usually do), then an arrest warrant would need to be sought to bring the person back to the presiding court to face the charges as well. Something that is even more expensive. If it they leave the province, no court in the country is going to issue an inter-provinical arrest warrant, nor is any Crown going to seek one just to bring a person back to face a summary offence.

Even within the province it is unlikely to go anywhere having to bring the victim to the trial, or bring the accused back when he leaves the area as soon as he knows the gig is up.

And even if they caught the person before they left and you said you would come to testify, or if you were willing to pay your own way, more people do not show up for petty property crime and after all the resources spent to prosecute them it ends up getting thrown up because it was not worth someone's time to show up. And no judge is going to hold the person in custody pending trial, so as soon as they get released they leave town knowing that it is unlikely anyone is willing to pay to bring them back to stand trial on a summary offence, and thus the arrest warrant will likely be radius the town it happened in, and not even province wide let alone country wide.

The Code and offences were written for a time when frauds under $5000 were exclusively local occurrences, as it was not worth the crooks time to do something over such distances (and would have to be quite elaborate to be able to do). The internet has changed that and criminals can orchestrate multiple frauds over multiple jurisdictions without leaving their basement.

My advice is if the deal is not local, either make sure you have a reason to trust the person you are dealing with, or be willing to walk away from the money.

But even if you get burned, make sure to report it.

If it is a one off, it is not likely to go anywhere (but even having an officer talk to the "fraudster" sometimes gets the job done). However if it is a regular scammer, there are units that deal with these people and are willing to prosecute the offences most of the time. I have seen some of these scammers phone numbers linked to hundreds of small frauds right across the country, and even though they may be only a few hundred dollars each, it adds up and the resources will be spent to do what can be done to shut them down.

As for getting your money back from these guys, good luck. Even if it ends in a successful prosecution and the court orders restitution, good luck getting it or enforcing it from across the country as well. You can't get blood from a stone.

Like I said, the Criminal Code never envisioned that someone would be able to scam someone so easily for so little money from across the country (or from out of the country), and thus the tools in it are not the easiest or most practical to try and investigate and prosecute these offences (which in the grand scheme of things are on the same level of shoplifting a pack of gum from your local corner store).

So it is not that there are "bigger fish to fry", or police "don't care about these scammers", it is how difficult it is to prosecute (let alone investigate) across such great distances and jurisdictions, and for a crime that is low enough on the radar it takes multiple ones to make it practical to prosecute.