Payments totalling $3.7-million flagged as possible fraud in bread price-fixing settlement
Banks flagged tens of thousands of Canadian bread-settlement payments totaling $3.7-million as potentially fraudulent, prompting efforts to freeze and recover funds.Summary
Canada’s bread price-fixing settlement administrator, Verita Global LLC, is seeking to recover part of $3.7-million in payments flagged by banks as possible fraud after Loblaw Cos. Ltd. and George Weston Ltd. settled 2024 class actions for $500-million over a 2001-2015 price-fixing scheme. Nearly 3.6 million payments totaling $174.2-million were made to claimants outside Quebec, but Interac identified about 2% as suspicious after smaller banks noticed unusually high numbers of deposits going into the same accounts, including one account receiving roughly 1,000 deposits.
Verita had already blocked about 40 million failed website requests, rejected millions of duplicate or suspicious claims, taken down a fake settlement website, and reported fraudulent text messages, but fraudsters may still have used different names and email addresses to collect deposit links. Bank of Nova Scotia is working with other banks to determine whether frozen funds can be returned; lawyers will ask the Ontario Superior Court to approve screening legitimate claims and placing remaining funds in a new Verita-administered fund. The separate Quebec settlement was not affected by similar fraud suspicions.
(Source：The Globe and Mail)