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Bank fraud victims want Ottawa to hold banks more accountable for losses
Canadians who've lost hundreds of thousands of dollars to scams are asking why banks face so little liability when fraud slips through.
Ralph Moore, an 88-year-old from Qualicum Beach, B.C., lost $450,000 over ten months to an online investment scam. It started in May 2025 with a deepfake video depicting Prime Minister Mark Carney promoting what appeared to be a government investment platform. Moore made repeated trips to his local TD Bank branch to arrange transfers, bank drafts, and payments to other people's credit cards - and the bank processed them.
Now Moore's family wants to know why those transactions were allowed to go through, and why the bank won't pay him back.
What the bank did - and didn't do
TD Bank wasn't entirely unaware. According to Moore's daughter Leslie Herrndorf, the bank questioned some transactions, warned Moore and his wife about scams, flagged the activity to its fraud and anti-scam teams, and temporarily restricted his account at one point.
But Herrndorf says that wasn't enough. She's asking why the transactions weren't permanently blocked, why her father's account wasn't frozen, and why no one from the bank tried to contact family members or police.
"How could $450,000 be allowed to be given away by a bank who'd been dealing with my dad for decades?" she said. "They knew this was unusual behaviour."
After discovering the fraud, Herrndorf had her father assessed for cognitive capacity. He failed.
"I don't think they protected me," Moore said.
A massive and growing problem
Moore's case is not an outlier. Canada's Anti-Fraud Centre reported that Canadians lost more than $700 million to fraud in 2025 across all types of scams - and it estimates only about five per cent of victims actually report what happened, meaning the real total is likely far higher.
Bank-specific fraud figures aren't broken out separately, but the pattern is consistent: e-transfer scams, bank impersonation schemes, investment fraud, and credit card fraud are all common, and in nearly every case, financial institutions place the responsibility for the loss on the customer.
Moore's family is among more than three dozen bank fraud victims who have raised the same question: why doesn't the federal government require banks to take on more liability when fraud occurs on their watch?
How other countries handle it
Canada's approach stands out internationally. In the United Kingdom, for example, new rules introduced in 2024 require banks to reimburse most victims of authorized push payment fraud - where a customer is tricked into sending money to a scammer - up to £85,000. The burden shifted significantly toward financial institutions to detect and prevent these transactions.
Australia has moved in a similar direction, with legislation placing obligations on banks, telcos, and digital platforms to take reasonable steps to prevent fraud or share liability for losses.
In Canada, no equivalent federal framework exists. Banks operate under voluntary codes and internal policies, and the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada oversees compliance with existing rules - but those rules don't require reimbursement in most fraud scenarios where the customer authorized the transaction, even under manipulation.
The broader question of bank responsibility
Advocates and affected families argue that banks have both the data and the tools to flag unusual transaction patterns - particularly for elderly or long-standing customers whose behaviour shifts dramatically. Moore had been a TD customer for decades. A sudden series of large transfers to unfamiliar accounts and third-party credit cards is the kind of activity fraud detection systems are built to catch.
The argument isn't that banks should absorb every fraudulent loss. It's that when a bank identifies suspicious activity, issues internal warnings, and still allows transactions to proceed - particularly involving a vulnerable customer - the question of where accountability lies becomes harder to dismiss.
For Herrndorf, the answer seems clear: "It is outrageous, with the known number of frauds happening, that a bank has decided that this is the level of customer service that's acceptable."