Fake Amazon calls are the top Canadian phone scam: study

Canadians most often receive scam calls related to Amazon, according to a new global study.

Compiled by Seattle-based Hiya, a phone scam tracking company, the ‘Q4 2024 Global Call Threat Report’ examined call fraud across a variety of countries and highlighted the rising threat of AI-generated deepfake voice scams. A key data point analyzed by the study centred around the differences in the kinds of scams that each country continues to face.

For Canada, phone calls impersonating Amazon were the dominant type of scam and almost twice as frequent as the second most common type of scam here overall: fraudsters impersonating telecom companies.

The full list of types of common phone scams in Canada is as follows:

1. Amazon
2. Telecoms
3. Delivery companies (Canada Post, FedEx, etc)
4. Social insurance
5. Chinese language
6. Credit card
7. Crypto trading
8. Insurance

By contrast, the most common U.S. phone scams were, in order, related to medicare, tax and insurance.

Canadians were among the biggest money losers on AI-generated deepfake voice scams, according to Hiya. The average amount of money lost by Canadians to a phone scam was $1,479, higher than everyone save France, which saw an average loss of €1,089 (roughly CA$1,623). The U.S. lost an average of US$539.

Canadians get fewer average scam calls than Americans

Elsewhere, the study found that Canadians have a monthly average of six spam calls, which is well below the 15 that Americans receive every month. However, Canada’s proportion of fraud calls, nine percent of all incoming calls, is much higher than the one percent reported in the U.S.

Beyond that, Hiya found that 20 percent of calls Canadians receive are of the “nuisance” variety, which the company defines as those from the likes of telemarketers, politicians, and pollsters. By comparison, 30 percent of incoming calls to Americans are considered nuisances.

In total, Hiya reported 11.3 billion spam calls around the world in Q4 alone. It should be stressed, of course, that this study being from Q4 2024 means that it took into account the busier holiday season, a particularly rampant time for scammers. That said, it’s still interesting to see this sort of data, especially with respect to the types of scams that seem to recur in Canada, specifically.

Hiya says its Q4 2024 Global Call Threat Report is based on a representative sample of calls observed on the Hiya Voice Intelligence Network, which includes Samsung Smart Call-enabled devices and the Hiya mobile app. The report also incorporates insights from a January 2025 survey of 12,000 consumers across the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Germany, France, and Spain.

More information on how to identify and protect yourself from all kinds of scams, as well as how to report suspected instances of fraud, can be found on the Government of Canada’s website.