Who to Call When
A recent Mountie Moments provided by the Turner Valley RCMP included a chart which illustrated what phone number to call in different emergency and non-emergency situations. If you are a High Country Rural Crime Watch Association member (FYI there are almost 800 members), you would have received a Mountie Moments HCRCWA fanout that had the February 6th Mountie Moments attached which included this chart.
A quick summary is as follows: If a crime is occurring NOW, call 911. (Also use this number for medical and fire emergencies.)
Call the Turner Valley RCMP non-emergency complaint line at 403-933-4262 if you need police to attend or call you back. A crime is not in progress. If you live in Rocky View County, I do not have the relevant number, but I suspect the Cochrane RCMP has a similar type of number.
Call the RCMP Turner Valley Detachment Administration line at 403-933-6600 for criminal record checks, collisions, etc, AGLC permit signature, to speak to a Constable about an existing file, booking civil fingerprints, anything administrative. Please note, if you call the administration line to place a non-emergency complaint you will be transferred to 403-933-4262. Again, I presume Cochrane detachment has a similar line.
Please contact Foothills County Protective Services (Peace Officers) at 403-603-6300 M-F 8:30 to 4:30 regarding traffic, bylaw, and animal complaints. Call 1-877-603-6331 afterhours for non-urgent situations.
Moving on, it has come to my attention that there is an online scam that involves the use of a pop-up “Ask an Expert”, “Can I Help You” type of situation. The person who made me aware of this was on a valid Government of Canada Pension web site when the pop-up occurred. Given this, you would think the pop-up would be legit, but it’s not.
The pop-up asks you if want help filling out a form/application or whatever for a $2 charge. In this particular incident as soon as the person, who was on a computer, clicked yes and provided a Visa credit card number, they received a text (on their phone) from Visa asking if they wanted to allow this $71 charge on their account. (Notice the size of the charge had been changed).
The “Ask an Expert” or “Can I Help You” pop-up was not associated with the Government of Canada but is a scam/hack from individuals in another country. There have been previous instances of this scam/ hack involving Visa so Visa is aware of it and sends out an automatic notice asking if you want to go through with this charge.
A Visa employee was in touch with this person and who were informed that the scam/hack had been tried a number of times before. In this instance it appeared the scammers tried to get the $71 charge to go through a number of times, but to no avail. The scammers now had a name and credit card number so Visa cancelled the old card and issued a new one. Fortunately, Visa believes this person’s personal information, like a SIN number, was not obtained by the scammers even though it was provided to the Government of Canada website.
This is a particularly sneaky scam as you are the one initiating the process on-ine on a legitimate website. I don’t know this for a fact, but I wouldn’t be surprised if other websites are vulnerable to the same pop-up scam. So watch out for pop-ups pretending to be associated with a website that ask for a credit card number.
Just as a reminder, whenever you bank online, it is a good idea to check the URL to ensure it is your bank’s legitimate website. I don’t have any specific advice to give you to spot an illegitimate banking URL, but if you are familiar with your bank’s normal look, you should be able to spot the difference. But take the time, each time, to attempt to verify it is indeed your bank’s legitimate website. Differences can be subtle as a scammer can “cut and paste” from a legitimate website to make theirs appear official. If you don’t have your bank’s online banking bookmarked, don’t count on Google or whatever search engine you use, to send you to the right place.
Dave Schroeder
HCRCWA Board Member
