Four weeks after St. Adolphe resident Keith Pearce was scammed out of $6,000 in a fake e-transfer transaction, he’s only nominally further ahead. As of the May long weekend, half of his lost funds have been reinstated by his financial institution, TD Bank. So far he’s been offered few reassurances on regaining the balance.

For Pearce, though, the lost money is only a small part of the problem. Perhaps the bigger issue is lack of interest from either Kijiji or TD Bank in warning the public about the risk of e-transfer scams.

On the contrary, he says, some representatives he’s spoken to while reporting his loss have made him feel like he’s the idiot for falling for the scam in the first place.

Truth be told, anyone who accepts e-transfers from strangers, like those using buy-and-sell sites as Pearce does, are vulnerable and mostly unaware of the risks of accepting e-transfers until it’s too late.

In Pearce’s case, he responded to a buyer interested in an item he was selling online. The buyer asked to send an e-transfer so Pearce would hold the item until they got there. It’s a pretty routine ask in the online selling world.

Unfortunately for Pearce, the buyer was actually a sophisticated scammer. The e-transfer email he received was a convincing fake. And when Pearce clicked on his financial institution to accept the transfer, the scammer was granted free rein of his bank accounts.

It took only seconds, Pearce says, for the scammer to withdraw $3,000 from one of his accounts and transfer money from another in order to take a second $3,000. Later, Pearce noticed that a portion of his phone text conversation with the scammer had been erased. The perpetrator had effectively covered their tracks.

Once he’d contacted the authorities about the scam, Pearce proceeded to reach out to the administration at Kijiji. So far they’ve ignored him.

“They should be making people aware of it by upping the alerts on their website,” Pearce says. “[They tell users], ‘Don’t do cash transfers and if you’re going to exchange something, go to a public place or a police parking lot.’ But they don’t tell you to watch out for e-transfer scams.”

In the banking realm, Pearce is shocked that emails or letters haven’t circulated to clients warning them about e-transfer scams and advising them on how to safeguard their transactions.

The Citizen spoke to cybersecurity expert Michael Jensen after Pearce’s experience. Jensen says that there are, in fact, ways to avoid e-transfer scams like this.

First, ensure that you’re set up with your bank for auto-deposit. That way, when you receive an e-transfer payment, it’s automatically deposited into your account and there are no emails to open or links to click on.

Secondly, when accepting a transfer from a stranger, always be the one to initiate the e-transfer. In other words, ask for the sender’s email address, then send a money request to that email from your online banking site.

To date, though, Pearce says he’s seen no warning indicators from TD Bank to inform their clients that there are safer ways to transfer money online—or, better still, require their clients to switch to auto-deposit, similar to their push for two-factor authentication.

Unless the companies involved get the word out, he says, these scams will only perpetuate and the losses to banking clients will continue to rise.

For Pearce, once burned, twice shy. He won’t be doing any more e-transfer transactions with strangers. He’s even gotten cautious about government websites that require banking information to set up auto-deposit payments.

“E-transfer is a far more dangerous way of doing banking than people seem to think,” says Pearce. “It opens a door so [scammers] can get in and move money around and take it at will.”