The biggest fraud category in Canada last year had 8,403 reports and not a single dollar of loss attached to it. Meanwhile the category with the most money lost had about half as many reports and cost victims $351 million. Both numbers come from the same government list. They are describing two completely different problems.
Every year the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre (CAFC) publishes its top 10 frauds, and every year the headline is a big dollar figure. For 2025 the CAFC reports over 112,000 fraud reports and more than $704 million in reported losses (these are the CAFC's own rounded totals; the page gives no exact figures). Fine. But a total tells you almost nothing about the call that just came in on your phone.
Here is our position: the CAFC list is a record of what Canadians report, sorted two ways, and neither sort is a list of phone scams. It is still worth reading closely, because the gap between the two sorts tells you where to spend your attention. We will show the figures exactly as the CAFC publishes them, then separate what the data says from what we think it means.
The 2025 figures, by number of reports
All figures in this section come from the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre's Top 10 frauds in 2025 page (CAFC data for 2025, page last modified February 25, 2026). Dollar amounts are as the CAFC states them, in Canadian dollars.
| Fraud type | Reports | Victims | Reported loss |
|---|---|---|---|
| Identity fraud | 8,403 | 8,403 | none shown |
| Investments | 4,409 | 3,867 | $351 million |
| Service | 3,393 | 2,444 | $19.5 million |
| Personal information | 3,016 | 2,109 | none shown |
| Phishing | 2,869 | 467 | none shown |
| Extortion | 2,767 | 835 | $23 million |
| Merchandise | 2,596 | 2,222 | $11.7 million |
| Fraud investigator | 2,167 | 1,137 | $28.3 million |
| Job | 2,148 | 1,726 | $50.6 million |
| Relationship | 1,093 | 933 | $63.3 million |
The CAFC notes that personal information and phishing do not involve financial losses, and that most identity fraud victims are not responsible for the losses. So "none shown" does not mean nobody was hurt. It means the loss is not counted the way the other rows are.
The same year, by dollars lost
The CAFC's second sort ranks by reported loss. The last column is our own arithmetic, not a CAFC figure: the reported loss divided by the number of victims the CAFC lists, rounded heavily. It is an average, and averages hide a lot, so treat it as a rough scale only.
| Fraud type | Reports | Victims | Reported loss | Our rough average per victim |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Investments | 4,409 | 3,867 | $351 million | about $91,000 |
| Spear phishing | 813 | 571 | $67.9 million | about $119,000 |
| Relationship | 1,093 | 933 | $63.3 million | about $68,000 |
| Job | 2,148 | 1,726 | $50.6 million | about $29,000 |
| Fraud investigator | 2,167 | 1,137 | $28.3 million | about $25,000 |
| Recovery pitch | 933 | 569 | $25.9 million | about $46,000 |
| Extortion | 2,767 | 835 | $23 million | about $28,000 |
| Service | 3,393 | 2,444 | $19.5 million | about $8,000 |
| Merchandise | 2,596 | 2,222 | $11.7 million | about $5,300 |
| Prize | 403 | 151 | $5.7 million | about $38,000 |
Our take: two lists, two different problems
The honest answer to "which fraud is the biggest?" is that the CAFC gives you two answers and neither is wrong. By volume, the top of the list is identity fraud, with 8,403 reports. By money, it is investments, with $351 million, which is roughly half of the more than $704 million total (our rounding of the CAFC's figures).
What nobody tells you when they quote the big total is how lopsided it is. Add up the ten dollar-ranked rows and you get about $646.9 million (our sum), so the top ten types carry most of the reported money. And one row, investments, carries about half of it. A year's worth of "scam alerts" can be loud about gift cards and parcel texts while the largest losses sit in a category built on long conversations and promises of returns.
The per-victim column makes the same point from the other direction. Our rough averages put merchandise and service frauds in the thousands of dollars per victim, and investment, relationship and spear phishing in the tens of thousands or more. Frequent and cheap is a different threat from rare and ruinous. The first one wastes your time and occasionally your money. The second can change your life. If we had to rank where attention pays off, we would put the high-average rows first, even though several of them generate fewer reports.
Where the phone fits, and where the data goes quiet
This is the part that matters for a site about phone numbers. The CAFC page ranks fraud types. It does not say how each type reached the victim, whether by call, text, email, social media or website. We cannot tell you from this page that "fraud investigator" is a phone problem or that "job" is a text problem, and nobody else can either. Anyone who says "a given share of 2025 losses came from phone calls" based on this list is making it up.
What we can do is point at where the CAFC's own wording touches phones. Its protection tips for this list include the reminder that caller ID information can be easily manipulated, so you should not trust it alone, and that you should not provide personal or financial information on demand. Both are about what happens at the moment the phone rings. For one type on the list, the Interac fraud prevention guidance describes calls from a supposed bank "investigator" and says to hang up and keep your banking details private. That is the script behind the "fraud investigator" row, which we take apart in our article on the bank investigator call. That connection is ours, not the CAFC's table.
What a reported loss does and does not mean
- It is a report, not a verdict. The figures are what people told the CAFC. They are not court findings.
- It is not the whole country. The CAFC page does not say how many frauds go unreported, and we will not invent a number. It is reasonable to read the totals as a floor of what happened, but that is our inference, not a CAFC statement.
- Reports are not victims. Fraud investigator shows 2,167 reports and 1,137 victims on the page. We do not know the CAFC's exact counting rules beyond what the page shows, so do not turn the gap into a success rate.
- Zero dollars is not zero harm. Identity fraud tops the report count with no loss shown, because most victims are not responsible for the losses. That does not make it harmless.
- One year only. We are comparing rows within 2025. A single year says nothing about trends.
What to take from it
The most useful thing the list shows is not a ranking but a pattern: by our rough arithmetic, the heaviest losses per victim sit with investments, spear phishing and relationship fraud, not with the types that draw the most reports. The CAFC's own tips include a line that applies to all of them: past fraud victims are often targeted again. That is visible in the table too, because "recovery pitch" is its own category, with $25.9 million in reported losses. If you have already lost money, the steps in this guide come first, and an offer to recover it for a fee is the thing to be most suspicious of.
In practice, three habits cover most of the list, whichever channel the first contact comes through:
- Treat a request for money or personal details that you did not start as a claim to verify, not a request to answer.
- Take time. The CAFC advice is to pause, question unexpected requests and talk to someone you trust.
- Report what you see. Details on how are in how to report a scam phone call.
Questions people ask about these numbers
Are these the total frauds in Canada in 2025?
No. They are the reports the CAFC received. The page does not claim to measure fraud that was never reported, and it does not estimate it.
Does the list show which frauds started with a phone call?
No. It ranks fraud types, not contact methods. Any phone-specific reading is interpretation, and we have labelled ours as such.
Why is identity fraud first by reports but missing from the dollar list?
The CAFC shows no dollar loss for it and notes that most identity fraud victims are not responsible for the losses. The harm is real, but it is not counted as victim losses in the same way.
The bottom line
The CAFC's 2025 list is two rankings of what Canadians reported, and the money sits in a few slow, persuasive frauds more than in the noisy ones. The page does not say which of them started with a phone call, so be wary of any statistic that claims to. Use the numbers to decide what deserves your caution: an unexpected request for money or personal details, from anyone, by any channel.