How do we stop the rise of romance fraud in Canada?

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Jordan Heath Rawlings Put yourself in this position for a moment. You’ve been victimized by a fraudster. It’s romance fraud. Someone said the things you wanted to hear, told you stories, talked their way into your heart and life, and your bed and your wallet. They got what they wanted and then they vanished. You are humiliated and embarrassed. Obviously, you’ve been taken advantage of in so many ways, and you feel stupid, but you have evidence, you know where this person went. You have correspondence from them, text messages and emails that prove their lies. You can seek justice. You have the receipts, so you turn it over to the police who probably don’t make an arrest, or if they do, they turn it over to the crown who probably doesn’t prosecute. And even if the case goes to trial, it’s likely only a single count of fraud and the person who ruined your life gets a slap on the wrist again, if it even gets that far, what do you do? How angry would you be? Why is this exact scenario so common in this country?

I’m Jordan Heath Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Maggie Reid and Emilia King are the creators of Catch Him If You Can, at Pink Moon Studio. Both of them are joining me now. Hello Maggie.

Maggie Reid Hi, Jordan

Jordan Heath Rawlings And hey Emelia.

Emilia King Hey Jordan.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Thanks so much for joining me, you guys.

Emilia King Absolutely. Oh my gosh, we’re so excited for this conversation.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Well, I wanna start with you, Emilia, and maybe just for our listeners, the few of them left. There shouldn’t be many of them left who haven’t listened to Catch Him If You Can yet, maybe you could give us a brief overview of the case that the podcast explores, and in particular who March is.

Emilia King Oh, yeah. Okay. So essentially, Marcel Andre Vautour is the subject of our case. He’s a serial grifter and con artist, and he’s really been doing this for over 20 years. He swindled close family members, friends, ex-partners, you know, unwitting strangers, who he brings into his schemes. And at this point he’s probably stolen over a million dollars at this point. You know, business fraud, investment fraud, medical fraud, romance fraud. And, most recently he was finally apprehended thanks actually to a podcast tip on a 2014 warrant that’s almost a decades old warrant for that two year period where he was defrauding, that Drummondville woman Marginal and her partner, he stole, or nearly stole a hundred thousand dollars from them. And then, as we heard in the last episode, he never returned to that Quebec Rehab Center where we actually learned, he got weekend privileges.

Jordan Heath Rawlings And if anybody listening to this wants to hear the whole complicated story about how with Emilia and Maggie, a group of women who had been victimized by Marcel teamed up to track him down and well. At least at one point apprehend him and everything that happened after that. You can listen to the entire Catch Him If You Can, wherever you want. Obviously if you’re listening on the Catch Him If You Can feed now. We’re going to get into a little bit more of the big picture around this kind of fraud. I know it’s a rich topic for podcasts and so maybe Emilia, you can just give us a sense of the extent of fraud in Canada and what the stakes are here.

Emilia King Okay, so last time we chatted Jordan, we were really focused on, romance fraud, right? We kind of talked about, the scope and scale of general fraud in Canada, but actually since launching the show, it’s risen majorly the Canadian Anti Fraud Center received reports totalling nearly 530 million of losses from fraud in 2022. And that represents nearly a 40% increase over the historic 380 million in losses in 2021. And we obviously have to keep in mind that only 5 to 10 per cent of cases are ever actually reported. So that number is so much bigger.

Jordan Heath Rawlings How often do people like March actually? Get caught and prosecuted clearly. It’s pretty difficult in his case. Can you gimme some examples of other cases and, and if they’ve been more successful?

Emilia King This is such a great question, and I think for me personally, I mean, and I, I’m speaking for Maggie as well. I think this was one of the most, shocking takeaways from this journey that we’ve been on. But like, no, this is not an isolated case. Not even in terms of the outcomes. Here are just like a couple of examples that demonstrate how tough this is. Okay. That, that was really shocking to us. Okay, so here’s, here’s one example. There’s this woman named Jane Elizabeth Moore of Alberta. She’s been pegged the queen of cons by her victims. And this is from one of her, most recent schemes from 2020. She essentially told people okay that she was in line to inherit over 36 million from the late “Doc” Seaman who was the previous owner of the Calgary Flames. And she claimed she was like this big hockey heiress. Okay? And just like March, you know, on these fantastical tales, her history of fraud dates back nearly two decades. And just like March, she goes by, you know, a whole bunch of different aliases. She’s faked cancer. She faked a disease that makes your eyes and ears bleed like we learned through a bit of digging that she actually used needles to poke her eyes and nose and ears. Anyways, this is all very shocking, like fantastical stuff. Her first conviction dates back to 2003. Okay? Even there she was given like a suspended sentence put on probation for two years. So again, like very similar to March, however, in this case, over a hundred more convictions she had since then most involving fraud, okay? She was initially charged with 399 counts of theft and a fraud for more than 350,000. She pleaded guilty okay? To just one charge, and the judge accepted the plea and because of credit for time served, she was actually able to walk away from the courthouse that day without spending any more time in jail. And then she was on probation for like, I think nine months, and then she was ordered to pay back $40,000. But anyways. Okay. Similarities to March here. Right. Depth and breadth of the fraud. You know, business fraud, medical fraud, impersonation, romance fraud, defrauding close family, the persistence of this type of behavior, right? The pattern. But all similarly amounting to a slap on the wrist. Right in terms of sentencing. The difference here though is I think, you know, she pursued most of her fraud in the same province, Alberta, and that’s why we saw a larger number of convictions in that case, but still, right, the outcomes are not great in terms of the sentencing. So I’ll just give one more example. And this is the 2020 case of Shawn Rutenberg. All right, so just again, in his latest scheme, he married a woman. He stole over $500,000 from her, stole her entire life savings, you know, promised he would make good investments for her. Similarly to what we heard March doing right, especially in the Marjalin case that he’s now being pursued for. But instead he bought himself a BMW and paid off his gambling debts. His ex-wife found out about his real identity about 18 months into the relationship, reported it to police and you know, that’s kind of how this all transpired. So essentially similar to the March in hockey heiress case, this guy also has a criminal history dating back decades. You know, he impersonated his prominent psychiatrist brother. He stole 1.8 million, frauded others close to him as well. Really extensive patterned history of this type of fraud. Okay, so he was found guilty. And again, the judge in this case wanted to make an example of him, right, to signal to fraudsters, like, hey, we’re getting tough on this. And even with that, he still only received six years. And remember again, the max sentence you can receive for fraud. Over 5,000 is 14 years, and this is considered a very, very harsh sentence. So for me, that’s really the part that’s shocking. Right? I think for us, Pink Moon and, and the ladies, right? Jodi, Kim and Andrea, I think we were all hoping that March would receive the max 14 years that you can get. But as just these two examples show and, and you know, based on what Andrew told us in that previous episode, it’s totally unlikely that he’s gonna get anything close to that.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Why are these cases so hard to pursue and prosecute? What makes them different from, you know, tax fraud, securities fraud?

Emilia King Oh, that’s a really, really great question. Maggie, do you wanna talk a little bit about that?

Maggie Reid Yeah, I mean, I think that there’s a couple of factors here. I think serial fraud’s, really hard romance fraud more specifically is really difficult to pursue because there’s a lot of difficulty in proving intent, right? This is a criminal charge there, you know, it has to be established beyond a reasonable doubt that this person intentionally deceived the alleged victim for financial gain, and that can be really, really hard to actually prove in court. And I think because of this difficulty, a lot of prosecutors just kind of walk away from these cases. And as we heard with the prosecutor and Jodi’s case, who decided not to pursue the charges, he said to her specifically, Like I believe that he did these things. You’re accusing him of, he said that point blank, but it’s not in the public interest to pursue these charges. They feel it’s going to be too difficult or too costly, not worth the amount of court resources to pursue this case. And also prosecutors, they probably want a win, right? Right. They don’t want to be pursuing these cases for smaller sums of money that they might not win. And so, This is a really, really difficult thing to get people to take seriously and actually, you know, spend the resources and the time to go after these people. So one part is the, you know, difficulty proving intent and the amount of evidence they have to mount. And this is true even when victims actually compile their own evidence and become detectives in their own cases. I think another difficulty is that oftentimes the victims just kind of give up. We already know that fraud is really under reported. A lot of times victims go to report these crimes and they’re kind of told that they’re never gonna get justice, and the police and the prosecutors are certainly not seeking these cases out. You have to be a very vocal person who’s pushing for action on your case. As we’ve seen with the ladies from our podcast, they’ve been pushing and still been facing barriers. So if you’re not doing that kind of pushing, you’re probably gonna get nowhere basically with these cases. So there’s, I think that there’s a lot of challenges on the side of, you know, resources, willingness, and then also taking these cases seriously, especially in romance fraud, we actually see a lot of similarities. We’ve been talking a lot, Emilia and I, about the similarities with sexual assault cases.

Jordan Heath Rawlings I was just about to say that. Yeah. It sounds a lot like, unsubstantiated or, you know, he said, she said et cetera, et cetera.

Maggie Reid It does and, and even what we hear from the victims, right? So picture you’re someone that’s just had romance fraud, like you’ve been in a relationship with someone for five, six months. You find out they’ve taken money and you thought you were in love and you are completely kind of shattered. You go into the police department and what happens? You’re not really taken seriously. You’re basically told this is gonna be difficult to prove. You’re kind of asking what you did, right? There’s a lot of blaming the victim that happens here. To the point where when victims go forward to report these cases, they feel violated. They feel re-traumatized almost because they feel like, oh, something wrong happened. I can go to the police and report this, and then they don’t get any feeling of, you are on my side. You are going to take this seriously and that I have any hope of justice. And so we really do see a lot of similarities between those cases and a lot of victim blaming, which is quite frankly why we wanted to kind of look at this case in the first place.

Jordan Heath Rawlings I wanna ask one more thing about that, because there’s a term you used, in a recent episode, called Rape by Deception. And since we’re talking about, the small boundary between romance fraud and sexual assault, explain what that is, how it works, and if we’ll ever see it in Canada.

Maggie Reid Yeah, so rape by deception is kind of what it sounds like. It’s also sometimes referred to as rape by fraud, and essentially it’s this legal concept where, you know, when two people engage in a seemingly consensual sexual act. The difference when it comes to rape by deception is that one person deceived the other person to make that sexual activity possible. Right? And the important point here when you are considering what this means in a legal framework, is that the deception involved in getting this person to engage in sexual activity is deemed to negate the consent, right? So for example, you know, if I’m someone who only consented to a sexual act because you told me you were this person and you lied, you know, left, right, and center to work your way into my heart, even though it looks like I consented. Right? And I did willingly consent. I would have never consented had I actually, you know, known who you were. And this is a really different kind of understanding of if you look at kind of modern sexual assault laws, it’s usually considered to be sex that is not consented to, you know, there’s a little bit of a grey area here, right? I mean, when someone lies to get money from someone, there’s a word for it. It’s theft, it’s fraud, right? When they lie to have sex with someone, what do we call it? And so in Canada, Rape by Deception doesn’t formally exist, but there is some legal precedent that is related, including something that was upheld from the Supreme Court last year. So there’s something that’s called Stealthing. Have you heard of this?

Jordan Heath Rawlings Yes. It’s removing the condom, right?

Maggie Reid It’s removing the condom. It is, yeah. And so there was a unanimous decision from the Supreme Court of Canada, the top court that ruled that Stealthing. So the act of either pretending to use a condom or removing one during sex without the partner’s consent can actually violate the grounds for consensual sex. So even though you consented, you didn’t consent to that. Right? And this kind of does plant the seeds for understanding consent differently than just, okay. Yes or no. Right? As you would see in these kind of romance fraud cases. Okay, well, yes, you could, you did consent to this. There was no physical coercion. Right. But at the same time, when someone is, is frauded out of money, like for example. Okay, so Jordan, if I ask you to invest in my like shady snake oil business, and I’m like, we’re, we’re gonna make a lot of money, right. And I say, you know, give me 50 grand. And you say, okay, I trust you. This, you know, the financial plan is sound. I take your 50K. And it turns out it was all a sham. Well, you willingly gave me money in that context, so you consented. However, it was under false pre tenses. So, In our legal system, we have mechanisms for negating consent in that context, because you were lied to. So why can that not apply to sex? And, and I think for us, and Jodi was pushing for this in her case, and why we think this is such a promising potential framework is that, you know, it’s, it’s a lot more serious. And I mean, it should be serious because I don’t think people understand how, and I don’t even fully understand how it feels to be violated at that level. Not only financially in terms of your, you know, emotional relationship, but physically letting someone like that into your bedroom, like these women feel so incredibly violated and we need to take it seriously. And maybe if we were taking it more seriously, there would be more of a deterrent for people like Marcel.

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Jordan Heath Rawlings So as cynical as it is to look at it this way, I can understand why police, at least from their point of view, as wrong as it might be, choose not to prosecute some of these cases or, or make it difficult on the victims. This is a story we’ve seen time and time again, but once we get to the court stage and in particular the conviction stage. Why do these people only tend to get slaps on the wrist then? You know, especially given, you know, everything you’ve outlined about how difficult it is to prove. You would think that once you’ve got someone in a courtroom dead to rights, that would be the time to send a message. Why not?

Maggie Reid Yeah, I think that’s a really, really good question, and I think there’s a few challenges. One, and especially in Marcel’s case, it’s really difficult because we’re not seeing all of his cases being presented at once. They’re all seen in isolation, especially when they’re happening in different jurisdictions, right? So when he is going up for charges in Quebec, we’re not seeing that, you know, there’s all of these other cases or charges that are being pursued against him in other places, right? That’s actually not a factor that the judge can or will look at. So, We’re not even looking at any of those potential charges. They might look at his past convictions, but right now, someone like Marcel, his past successful conviction was from over 20 years ago. Right? And so, so when he’s coming in and saying, listen, I have addiction problems. I’ve changed. I’m turning my life around. That can be kind of a believable story for someone maybe. I think the other thing is something that Emilia pointed to in the case with the hockey heiress, which is that oftentimes, serial fraudsters will plead guilty to one charge or maybe a couple of charges, but not everything, and then get sentenced based on what they plead to. So not the totality of their crimes. And again, we’re looking at police resources here, court resources, taking them to trial would be lengthy and expensive if they choose to plead not guilty. So they essentially plead out to get a lighter sentence, which means they are free sooner. And able to get back to business essentially, which seems to happen in most cases. And I think because they aren’t violent offenders, they often get time served early parole, or even things like house arrest instead of actually serving a jail sentence. So I think it’s just not seen to be maybe a good use of, you know, court resources because of those reasons.

Emilia King To jump in too, like we have to remember that the max sentence for fraud over 5,000 is, is just 14 years and they rarely ever, I mean, we haven’t seen from our digging a case where somebody actually got the maximum term.

Jordan Heath Rawlings And this is what happened with Marcel in Quebec, right in Mar Jo Lane’s case is lack of a will by the prosecution to factor in past convictions and all the alleged crimes and just focus on the one in front of him and listen to please about turning my life around getting addiction help, et cetera.

Maggie Reid Yeah, so I guess it’s. One of the things that we realized because the ladies were so persistent in putting together materials, you know, to send to the prosecutor about all of Marcel’s, you know, alleged crimes in other places, and this whole detailed timeline of everything that he’s done. But when we talked to a lawyer who kind of gave us more context about how this actually works. None of that is being factored in to Marcel’s case, any of his alleged conduct. So there’s something called relevant conduct in the US where some of that would be taken into consideration in you know his current sentencing, but it’s not in Canada. There’s no relevant conduct. They’re only looking at past convictions and you know, while obviously inconvenient for our case, we also, we do understand why that exists, right? Considering relevant conduct that hasn’t been proved in a court of law can be really damning for people. But it’s also challenging when you don’t have a legal system that’s taking any of these things seriously because it’s really difficult to get conviction. So you just end up being stuck in this loop where you know you’re not getting justice and then you’re trying to say, look at all this stuff that’s happening, and they’re saying we can’t. And yeah, it’s just so frustrating. It’s so frustrating because, you know, there’s so much evidence, in these cases. But nobody’s actually pursuing it.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Is there one thing that could maybe not fix all this but could make it significantly better. Like if you could change something about the way our justice system deals with this kind of stuff specifically, what would it be?

Maggie Reid For me, I think it would start with, at the point of, you know, when people report these cases, I think we need to have police be better trained to report these cases. Like to actually have intake of victims. And I would never say put more resources towards policing. I don’t know that we should do that, but perhaps diverting resources or better training officers to, you know, deal with victims of these cases. Because I think a big challenge here is that, again, we’re having this vicious cycle of victims go in, they’re kind of turned away by police, so they just let these cases go, and then we’re not actually seeing the full extent of how many people are out there that have had this happen to them that need justice. And then we’re not really seeing the justice system compensate for how prevalent these crimes are. So I really think it needs to start at that point. Of course there are other things like, you know, jurisdictions talking to one another, having perhaps a lower threshold for Canada-wide warrants would probably be a good thing in cases like this. But I really, really do think it starts at the point of the victims coming forward and how they’re treated and whether they are taken seriously because it really sets a tone for what happens next.

Jordan Heath Rawlings So last question for both of you then. Now that it’s all over, I know Marcel is not currently in custody. But now that this season of the podcast is over, what are you gonna take away with you from the making of this that you would like people to understand a little better?

Emilia King Hmm. You wanna go first? Maggie?

Maggie Reid I’ve been talking a lot. I think you go first.

Emilia King All right. Yeah. I think for me, the biggest realization is he’s gonna keep doing this. He’s gonna keep doing this and like, you know, Maggie has been talking about you and Jordan, you’ve been talking about like, the system can be made better, but there needs to be like a will to fix it. I think that’s what I’m taking. It’s like a very sober realization. I, I just, I didn’t think I imagined it to have gone this way. I, I think, I thought he would get 14 years.

Jordan Heath Rawlings What about you Maggie?

Maggie Reid Yeah, I mean, just to kind of tag onto that, I think we came into this doing this investigation, not liking this narrative of b laming the victim. We didn’t realize that it was gonna open this whole can of worms to, you know, how justice system handles these cases. But I wanna say we came into this looking at the way. You know, other true crime shows, particularly portraying romance fraud. The entertainment was really how dumb the women are, right? So the audience can kind of feel detached from the victim, because they feel like it’s a situation they would never see themselves in. And when we came into this, we wanted to flip the script on that because, Even if you think you could never be in that situation, and even if that’s true, why are we blaming the victims rather than focusing on the perpetrators? These women feel violated, traumatized, it has an ongoing lasting impact on their lives, their relationships. Their ability to trust. And so I’m kind of taking away that. I just feel like proud that we were able to tell this story and hopefully change some people’s minds about victims of this crime. And you know, I hope that we can just also expose some of the malfunctions of the criminal justice system.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Maggie, Emilia, thank you both for chatting with me about this and also for all the work you guys have done on this case.

Maggie Reid Thanks so much, Jordan.

Emilia King Thanks, Jordan.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Maggie Reid and Emilia King, creators of Catch Him If You Can, but you can find, as you know, wherever you get your podcasts. That was The Big Story. For more from us, you can head to TheBigStorypodcast.ca, or yes, wherever you get your podcasts. You can find us on Twitter @TheBigStoryfpn. You can email us hello@TheBigStorypodcast.ca, and you can call and leave a voicemail (416)-935-5935. I’m Jordan Heath Rawlings. Thanks for listening. We’ll talk tomorrow.

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