Grandparent scams steal millions from seniors. Organized crime made Montreal a hotbed for them

CBC News is investigating grandparent scams and their link to Montreal. This story is part one of a three-part series. 

In June 2024, eight young men and women were working the phones inside a squat, two-storey building next to Lakeshore Road in Pointe-Claire, a suburb in Montreal's West Island, when police officers stormed in. 

In an indictment unsealed earlier this month, Michael Drescher, the district attorney of Vermont, said the group was caught in the act that day. They were placing phone calls to "elderly victims in Virginia," pretending to be their grandkids and asking for money. 

Drescher alleged that the group, and 17 other Canadians — nearly all from the Montreal area, and many from the West Island suburbs — was part of an elaborate international scam network that defrauded hundreds of American seniors out of a total of more than $21 million US. 

The indictment details how the group, and their alleged accomplices, performed a carefully choreographed fraud — known as a grandparent scam — at multiple call centres in the Montreal area, allegedly under the leadership of Gareth West, a 38-year-old from Burlington, Ont.

But it was not the first time police officers raided scam call centres in the Montreal area and arrested groups — called "cells" in court documents — involved in grandparent scams. 

CBC News has found that police targeted a similar grandparent scam network operating in Montreal just months earlier that was strikingly similar to the recent case. Police and experts say the scams appear to be connected to organized crime.

American officials believe West's alleged grandparent scam operation began in the summer of 2021, mere months after the authorities broke up a different operation allegedly run by a Montrealer named Anthony David Di Rienzo.

A summary of facts filed in court detailing the allegations against Di Rienzo says his scam began in 2019 and ran until March 24, 2021, when police arrested 15 people in the Montreal area and simultaneously arrested U.S. accomplices whose job was to collect money from victims. 

The allegations against Di Rienzo and his group mirror the ones against West and his group. 

For instance, both networks exclusively targeted seniors in the U.S. Both involved multiple "cells" operating out of "call centres." Both employed teams in the U.S. whose job was to pick up the money sent by a victim to abandoned or vacant addresses in the U.S.

Court documents filed in the Di Rienzo case allege that the group targeted American seniors and varied the states they were calling each day because they believed it made it harder for police to track them down. 

The authorities in both the U.S. and in Canada have levelled similar claims against both of the groups allegedly run by West and Di Rienzo. The groups allegedly had similar organizational structures and chose their victims in similar ways: police say the head of the network delivered daily lists of potential victims to the cells.

Those lists contained information including the name, age, address, phone number and income of possible victims. Neither the court documents filed in the U.S. or in Canada say where those lists came from, but police have said the information could have come from data leaks or even simply from publicly available sources.