Canada is being hit by fraud at levels far higher than comparable markets, according to Giles Sutherland (pictured left), head of business development for commercial and public sector at Interac, who warned during a recent panel that the country is facing a uniquely elevated threat.
“Canada's being targeted. It's a reality. We're seeing the fraud losses, even though it's underreported,” he told the audience at a conference hosted by Thomson Reuters.
One of the clearest signs of the escalation, he noted, is the rapid rise in automotive fraud. Industry data shows auto-related fraud surged more than 76% last year – a spike Sutherland described as emblematic of the broader trend affecting Canadian consumers and businesses.
The scale and pace of this growth highlight how aggressively fraudsters are now targeting the country and how quickly the threat landscape is evolving, he said.
Sutherland said the surge in fraud is no longer confined to a single touchpoint – it’s spreading across multiple areas of the financial and commercial ecosystem.
“We’re seeing that impact of fraud hitting all of these different areas,” he said.
Even services widely viewed as safe and convenient are being repurposed by criminals to facilitate attacks, illustrating how quickly familiar tools can become vulnerable once fraudsters identify an opportunity.
That shift is also reshaping expectations across the industry. As more services move into digital channels and consumers demand faster, more seamless experiences, organizations face growing pressure to strike the right balance between convenience and security.
“As we move more things into digital flow, we need to find that right balance,” Sutherland said.
According to him, both the private sector and government are now pushing for stronger, more unified approaches to identity verification and fraud prevention, recognizing that fragmented, institution-by-institution safeguards are no longer sufficient.
He said this rising urgency has created momentum for broader collaboration across financial services, insurers, and public agencies, with stakeholders increasingly looking for shared solutions that can operate across sectors rather than in isolated silos. The scale of the threat, he noted, demands a coordinated response.
Sutherland said the rising sophistication of fraud requires a shift in mindset across the industry – away from isolated defenses and toward a more systemic view of risk. The tactics used by criminal networks, he noted, have evolved far faster than many organizations’ ability to coordinate their response.
“Fraudsters are good. They’re very good at what they do,” he said.
The same advances in AI that are reshaping financial services are also being exploited by attackers. Tools that generate realistic fake IDs in seconds or automate mass identity attacks have made traditional verification methods far more vulnerable.
Much of the problem, Sutherland added, stems from fragmentation. Critical fraud and trust signals exist across multiple sectors – banks, telecoms, insurers, and government agencies – but they typically remain siloed. A telecom provider may see a newly activated prepaid phone flagged with suspicious patterns. A bank may see unusual transfers. An insurer may see mismatched identity information. But those signals rarely connect across institutions.
“We’ve got these silos of data,” he said. “All these signals exist, but we’re not very good at actually connecting.”
Sutherland argued that linking those signals across sectors – responsibly and with strong governance – is now essential to defending against increasingly coordinated attacks. Fraudsters already operate across industries and platforms; institutions, he said, need to meet that coordination with their own.
He pointed to new forms of cross-sector collaboration emerging among financial institutions, telecoms, insurers, and government agencies, all recognizing that the next phase of fraud prevention will require secure ways of sharing insight and validating identities across the broader ecosystem.
“Without that approach where we can connect and link some of these things, we’re really going to be in a weak position against the increasingly sophisticated fraud we’re seeing,” he said.
