The Grandchild on the Phone Is Not Your Grandchild

The call

The phone rings, and it’s your grandson. He sounds upset, maybe like he has a cold. He’s been in a car accident, or he’s been arrested, and he needs money for bail or a lawyer right now. And please don’t tell Mom and Dad.

Then someone else comes on the line, a police officer or a lawyer. They sound very calm and official, and they’re very clear about how much money is needed and how you can get it to them.

The Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre (CAFC) calls this the emergency scam. Most of us know it as the grandparent scam. It has been around for years. What’s new is that the voice on the line can now sound EXACTLY like someone you love.

This one is close to home for me. When my parents were fairly elderly, a scammer talked them into buying Apple gift cards and handing them over. Thankfully, the person at the store caught on, and they were able to step in and help my parents avoid doing something they would have regretted.

Where the scary numbers come from

If you’ve read anything about AI voice scams, you may have seen two numbers. One in four adults has experienced a voice-cloning scam, and victims lose up to $15,000. They get repeated a lot, so I went looking for where they came from.

Both figures trace back to a single online survey by McAfee, the company that sells antivirus and identity-protection software. It ran from April 13 to 19, 2023 and asked about 7,000 adults in seven countries: the US, the UK, France, Germany, Japan, Australia and India. Canada wasn’t one of them.

And they don’t mean quite what the headlines suggest. The “one in four” counts people who had experienced a voice scam themselves OR knew someone who had. One in ten said they’d been targeted personally. The “$15,000” is the top of a range: 7% of the victims in the survey said they’d lost between $5,000 and $15,000.

So the figures everyone quotes come from a three-year-old survey with no Canadians in it, run by a company that sells protection against this very thing. That doesn’t make them false, but it’s a good reason not to take them at face value.

What the Canadian numbers say

For Canada, the place to look is the CAFC, which is run jointly by the RCMP, the Competition Bureau and the Ontario Provincial Police.

Reported losses to the emergency scam went from about $2.4 million in 2021 to $9.2 million in 2022. In 2023 they passed $11.3 million, which made it the seventh most costly fraud the CAFC tracked that year.

Then the number fell. CBC Marketplace, citing CAFC figures, reported that Canadians lost nearly $3 million to this scam in 2024. It didn’t make the CAFC’s top ten frauds by dollar loss in 2024 or in 2025.

I can’t tell you why it fell. The figures go up and down, and I won’t guess at the reason.

Now, two cautions go with every one of these figures. The CAFC estimates that only 5% to 10% of frauds are reported at all, so the real losses are much larger. And none of the CAFC figures I found separate a cloned voice from an ordinary impostor doing a good impression. So there’s no way yet to know how many Canadian cases involved AI. I looked for a Canadian survey that measures this, and couldn’t find one.

So the numbers will never tell the whole story. What I do know is that this kind of fraud happens a lot. The people behind it are good at what they do, and people who think they’re too smart to be fooled get caught too. That’s why it pays to stay on guard.

How the call usually goes

The stories change, but the pattern underneath them doesn’t. As the CAFC describes it, someone claims to be a grandchild, or calls on a grandchild’s behalf. There’s an arrest, an accident, or trouble getting home from another country. Money is needed for bail, legal fees, or a hospital or ambulance bill, and it’s needed now.

The warning signs the CAFC lists are:

• Urgency and pressure to act immediately.
• A caller who says they’re police or a lawyer.
• A “gag order”, meaning you’re told not to talk to anyone about it.
• A request for cash, cryptocurrency or gift cards.
• A new phone number you’re asked to use in place of the one you know.

There’s a text version too. “Hi Grandma, I broke my phone, this is my new number,” followed by a request for money to fix it or pay a bill.

And sometimes the money is collected in person. The CAFC says the people arrested were picking up cash at victims’ homes, in every province.

CBC Marketplace told the story of Marilyn Crawford, an Ontario senior who got this call in 2021. First a “police officer”, then a voice she believed was her grandson’s, saying he’d been arrested for stealing a car and needed $9,000. The scammers even sent a taxi to take her to a CIBC branch in Oshawa. A staff member there flagged the withdrawal, and a financial advisor called her son before any money moved. The family still wonders whether the voice was cloned with AI. Nobody has confirmed it.

What AI changes, and what it doesn’t

McAfee says its researchers made a clone that was about an 85% match from three or four seconds of recorded speech, using a free tool. That’s the vendor’s own test, so treat the exact number with some caution. The practical point holds anyway: a familiar voice on the phone doesn’t prove anything anymore.

And it isn’t only voices. AI can now produce convincing fake video and pictures as well, and I don’t think most of us have caught up with how good these fakes have become. That’s why being aware, and staying alert, matters more than ever.

So here’s the encouraging part. However the call is dressed up, the pattern underneath is the same: urgency, secrecy and money in a hurry. Every defence below works on that pattern, so it holds up whatever the voice sounds like.

What the CAFC, police and banks say to do

• Hang up and call back. The CAFC’s first tip is to hang up and call your family member directly, on a number you already have. Never on a number the caller gives you.
• Agree a family safe word. The Edmonton Police Service advises setting “a safe word or phrase with family members that includes details only you would know.” RBC gives the same advice. A real grandchild in real trouble will know it. A cloned voice won’t.
• Ask a question only the real person could answer. RBC suggests this too: the name of the family dog, or what you all ate last Christmas.
• Check with someone else. RBC suggests contacting someone close to the grandchild, like a parent, to confirm the story. This is exactly what the “don’t tell Mom and Dad” line is designed to stop.
• If the caller says they’re police, hang up and call the police yourself. The CAFC says to use a number from a reliable source. It also points out that you can’t bail someone out of jail with cash or cryptocurrency.
• Don’t trust caller ID. The CAFC warns that scammers fake the number that shows up on your screen.
• Slow down. Edmonton police put it simply: high pressure usually means a scam, and anyone who tells you to keep a police matter secret from your family is running a scam.

The CAFC also suggests limiting what you share online, because scammers use social media to learn about you and the people you love. Well, that one is worth passing on to the grandkids too, because their posts can give away just as much as yours.

If money has already gone

Move quickly, and don’t be embarrassed. These are professionals working from a script, and they’re very good at it. The CAFC sets out the steps in this order:

1. Gather everything: receipts, texts, emails, the phone number that called, and any courier or transfer details.
2. Call your bank, or whichever financial institution sent the money. The sooner they know, the better.
3. Call your local police and ask for a file number.
4. Report it to the CAFC online, or by phone at 1-888-495-8501, Monday to Friday, 10 a.m. to 4:45 p.m. Eastern time.

The CAFC and police ask you to report it even if you didn’t lose a cent.

One more thing worth knowing before you ever need it: your bank won’t automatically give the money back. Canada’s banking ombudsman, OBSI, has said that financial firms don’t automatically reimburse fraud losses, and that it depends on how the fraud happened and whether your own actions played a part. In one case it published, the bank refused to pay because the transfers were made with the customer’s correct password and a one-time code sent to his phone. So never share a password or a code, even with someone who sounds official. I plan to write more about passwords and keeping your accounts safe in a separate article.

One more warning from the CAFC: be very wary of anyone who contacts you offering to get your money back for a fee. Fraudsters often target the same victim twice. Never send “recovery” money.

I keep these numbers on the Resources page so they’re easy to find when you need them.

Try this

• Agree a family safe word this week. Pick something nobody could guess from Facebook.
• Save the CAFC number, 1-888-495-8501, in your phone under “Fraud”.
• Write your family’s real phone numbers on a card by the phone, so you never need the number a caller gives you.
• Tell your grandkids about this scam. They’re the ones being impersonated, and they can help by keeping their own details private.

One small next step

Pick up the phone this week and call the people who’d be named in a call like this. Your kids, your grandkids, maybe a brother or sister. Tell them about the scam, agree on a safe word together, and make it something that makes you all laugh a little. It takes five minutes, and it’s the one thing a cloned voice can’t fake!

Sources: Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, Emergency scams · Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, What to do if you’re a victim of fraud · Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, Report fraud · Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, About us · Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, CAFC supports OPP in major grandparent fraud investigation (April 2024) · Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, presentation with 2023 fraud figures (July 2024) · Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, Fraud Prevention Month 2025 (2024 figures) · Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, Top 10 frauds in 2025 · Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, Fraud Prevention Month 2026 news release (March 2026) · RCMP, CAFC and OPP raise awareness after an increase in emergency-grandparent scams (February 2023) · CBC Marketplace, Her grandson’s voice said he was under arrest (March 2025) · Edmonton Police Service, Grandparent scam · RBC, The grandparent scam: what it is and how to protect yourself (June 2024) · McAfee, Beware the Artificial Impostor (May 2023) · OBSI, Consumer a victim of fraud but bank not responsible for loss · Global News, Bank security questioned after Alberta small business owner is scammed out of $65K (OBSI comments). Last verified October 28, 2026. Scam tactics and reporting numbers change, so check the CAFC site for the latest.