The Most Popular Canadian Immigration Scam in 2020
April 8, 2021
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Of all the scams doing the rounds, the fake email scam is probably the most popular Canadian immigration scam so far in 2020. Scammers take advantage of the fact that everyday we surf hundreds of websites, and naturally when we are interested in a certain topic, for example immigrating to Canada, we may visit multiple websites as we search for useful information. This is where online scam artists seize their opportunity. They will send you unsolicited emails which claim to be from a Canadian immigration website, possibly even fake ones you may have visited, making grand and too “good to be true” claims based on the little information they have about you, usually just a name and an email address. It is up to you to discern what is real or fake in the emails you receive and to help you do this, we would like to point out a few red flags to look out for today and in future.
How to Spot a Scam e-Mail
In the email below you will see a large variety of errors. Read through it and see if you can spot them, then we will discuss some of them as they tend to appear a few times throughout the e-mail.The Fake Immigration eMail
Can you spot the grammatical errors? The attempts to use technical words that have an entirely different meaning to what the writer thinks? The incorrect sentence structure? This email is a great example because it is just so full of errors it is easy to spot, from a mile away, that it is a scam. No self respecting immigration consultancy would allow emails like this to go out under their name. Now look at the same email below where we have highlighted the errors. Maybe you can even spot a few more. Let us know in the comments section if you do! Let’s take a quick look over some of them. As we mentioned previously, many of the underlined mistakes are repeated a few times and won’t be addressed:- ”Thanks for you interest to work” - missing and incorrect words: Thank you for your interest in working with…
- ”found Your credential, experience” - poor grammar and capitalization error: found your credentials and experience to be suitable…
- ”employment protocol” - unnecessarily technical word: protocol is defined as an official procedure, which is a $10 word where a $1 would have worked better. To be honest we can’t even figure out what they are trying to say here.
- ”to match” - the entire sentence structure is wrong. It is long and winding, do you feel as lost as we do reading this sentence? That’s because that is how they want you to feel, confused and like they know what they are thinking about, which they do not.
- ”you Contract” - missing word and unnecessary capitalization: send you the contract
- ”oblige you” - wrong word: oblige is defined as making yourself legally bound to something or doing as someone asks, so you would be obliging them by signing the attached contract, not the other way around
- ”mutual respect and sincerity” - trust building words: while language like this has a place, it is clearly being laid on thick here to help build a false sense of trust. Be weary of too much of this kind of language, it is not professional and coercive.