Scams

Money mules and recovery scams, when the scheme needs your account

Some gambling schemes want a player's name rather than a player's money, together with a verified account and a bank account that has never raised a flag, which they can use for months before anyone notices. Others arrive after a loss, offering to get the money back for a fee, and they are the cruellest, because they choose people already hurt.

Play with our money, keep a share

The offer usually arrives as a job or a favour: someone sends money to your bank account, you deposit it at a casino, play a little, withdraw it to the same account and send most of it on, keeping a share for the trouble. The money in such schemes is usually the proceeds of another fraud, and running it through a casino account makes it look like winnings, which is why the account holder (not the sender) is the person that the bank and the police will find.

The same offer is also framed as a "payment processing" job (which is the same thing with a better title), and we would refuse it under any name. The bank will usually freeze or close the account once the pattern appears. The person whose account carried the money can also be investigated for "laundering" (whatever story they were told). A small share is not worth a closed bank account!

Renting out an account

A second offer asks to borrow or buy a "verified account", for a monthly fee or a lump sum, so that someone else can play under the holder's name (often a person outside the province, a person who has self-excluded or someone too young to register). Every registered operator makes an account personal to one verified person, and will close it when it finds out; the deposits, losses and winnings stay on the holder's record, and the holder's identity is now in a stranger's hands.

Casino jobs and online friends

"Task" schemes present themselves as work, paying a commission per task (rating games, testing slots or placing bets on a platform), with a balance that grows on the screen until a "top-up" is needed to unlock the next set of tasks or to withdraw what has been earned. A related scheme starts with a friendly contact on a dating app or social media, who after a few weeks shows a betting "platform" where they never lose and offers to guide you. The platform, of course, belongs to the people who wrote in the first place.

Both are "advance-fee" frauds, and both end in the same way, with a balance that cannot be withdrawn and a request for one more payment before it can.

Recovery scams

After a loss, a victim may be contacted by someone who knows what happened (the amount, the site, sometimes the dates) and offers to get the money back: a "recovery agent", a law firm, a "blockchain investigator" or even someone who claims to call from the police or from a bank's fraud department. The knowledge is the hook. It usually comes from the first fraudsters themselves, since lists of victims are kept and sold, and it is what makes the second call so persuasive.

The Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre calls this the "recovery pitch", and its advice is short: never pay an advance fee to obtain a refund, and never let an unknown person take "remote control" of a computer or phone (the centre also warns that its own name is used in these calls). No police service charges a victim to investigate, and a refund that begins with a payment from the person being refunded is, by its very shape, the next stage of the fraud.

Genuine remedies exist, but in our reading the victim seeks them out rather than being found by them: a dispute with the card issuer (a "chargeback"), the recall of a recent transfer through the bank, and the complaint route that ends at AiGC when a registered operator is involved.

What to do

We would refuse to move money for anyone, refuse to lend an account and stop paying any platform that asks for a top-up; then we would call the bank. We would report the contact to the local police and to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre (1-888-495-8501 on weekdays, or online at reportcyberandfraud.canada.ca), and if an account at a registered site was involved, tell its support team as well, since it can freeze the account before more money passes through it.

Anyone who took part in "good faith" does better to tell the bank and the police first, and a lawyer can advise on the rest (we cannot). The page on online gambling scams lists the other calls to make, and where to find help lists the services for the gambling and the debts that often come with these schemes.

By the Alberta Casinos Online editorial team · Last updated: November 13, 2026 · Online since 2026