Ontario Provincial Police Superintendant Jennifer Spurrell, director of Financial Crime Services, at the OPP headquarters in Orillia, Ont., on Jan. 8.Melissa Tait/The Globe and Mail
Four police officers were waiting for Charles DeBono when he stepped off a plane from the Dominican Republic at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport.
The man from Barrie, Ont., was accused of having orchestrated an international Ponzi scheme that had roped in more than 500 investors and brought in somewhere between $40-million and $48-million of funds.
His arrest on Sept. 12, 2020, was the culmination of years of work by Ontario’s Serious Fraud Office, then a still-nascent agency exploring a new approach to the vexing problem of white-collar crime.
Criminals are siphoning millions of dollars out of the Canadian economy annually, with fraud victims reporting a total of $544-million in losses to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre in the first nine months of 2025. The losses are on track to surpass the $645-million reported to the agency in 2024. And actual losses are believed to be much higher; the agency has said that its figures represent an estimated 5 per cent to 10 per cent of all fraud.
The situation is so dire that the most recent federal budget included a plan to implement a national anti-fraud strategy, and Canadian organizations recently announced a voluntary coalition aimed at tackling scams.
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“The prevalence of fraud is through the roof,” said Ontario Provincial Police Superintendent Jennifer Spurrell, who oversees the investigative side of the Serious Fraud Office, or SFO, as well as the OPP’s anti-rackets branch, a more traditional financial crime unit.
“The intake that we receive, it’s increasing all the time. We can’t keep up with it, especially the cyber-enabled fraud incidents right now,” she said.
Inspired by similar structures in Britain and the United States, the SFO brings investigators and specialized Crown prosecutors together and gives them the time and resources to focus on tackling complex financial crimes.
“It was brought together because these financial crimes are so sophisticated and complex and resource-intensive that individual police services didn’t really have the resources to support the investigations,” Supt. Spurrell said.
The case involving Mr. DeBono is a “success story for the SFO,” Supt. Spurrell said. The office scored another major victory recently when a four-year investigation led to the convictions of two men involved in the multimillion-dollar redevelopment of Toronto’s St. Michael’s Hospital. In 2024, the most recent year for which statistics are available, the SFO started five new investigations and charged 24 people with 93 offences.
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The office’s origin story lies in a confidential 2015 report by former Ontario Court of Appeal justice Stephen Goudge. It was based on months of interviews with investigative agencies around the world, including the U.S. Department of Justice office in the Southern District of New York, an agency responsible for a number of high-profile prosecutions.
The government barred the release of Mr. Goudge’s report, but his conclusions led to the establishment of the SFO, an integrated approach in which police officers collaborate with prosecutors from the outset of a case.
The prosecutors, who work out of a separate office on the same floor, provide the investigators with real-time legal advice on things such as evidence collection, interview strategies and the drafting of search warrants.
“This allows us to be comfortable that our cases are going to withstand legal scrutiny eventually when we do bring them to court,” Supt. Spurrell said.
The SFO was still being assembled when it started investigating Mr. DeBono in 2018.
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Using the alias “Brian Coneybeare,” Mr. DeBono ran Debit Direct, which he claimed allowed investors to buy point-of-sale debit terminals that were to be placed at small businesses. Investors paid $2,500 to $3,100 for a single terminal and were promised returns of 15 cents for every transaction conducted through their machine, according to the ruling from the Ontario Superior Court.
The company listed its address at First Canadian Place, a tower in Toronto’s financial district, but was actually run out of an auto repair shop in Barrie called Dave’s Car Care.
The terminals were also a sham; although Debit Direct did own a handful of terminals, they were never placed anywhere, and the monthly remittance reports that investors received were fake; the returns were funded by deposits from new investors.
The Ponzi scheme went on for five years before it collapsed, at which point Mr. DeBono moved to the Dominican Republic. He’d married a woman who lived there, and for years had been shipping his assets to the country, including high-end autos, motorcycles, all-terrain-vehicles and Sea-Doos.
When investors stopped receiving their funds, they started reporting the fraud to their local police agencies. Those reports went to nine different municipal police services, said Detective Staff Sergeant Nicole Hanks, who worked on the case.
“We needed to centralize the investigation … information was falling through the cracks,” Det. Staff Sgt. Hanks said.
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Supt. Spurrell and Det. Staff Sgt. Hanks knew that investigating an international fraud would be tricky. Some victims were located outside of Canada, and Mr. DeBono had moved much of the money and assets to the Dominican Republic. The case would require the co-operation of international partners such as Interpol.
But the police were undeterred. The SFO’s team of prosecutors helped find solutions to the case’s international complexities, Supt. Spurrell said.
“You really do need to have a partnership in order to bring one of these across the finish line,” she said.
The integrated model also makes it more likely for cases to make it to trial within the strict deadlines imposed by what’s known as the Jordan ruling.
In a landmark 2016 decision called R. v. Jordan, the country’s highest court tried to address the delays plaguing Canada’s justice system by requiring cases heading to provincial court to be tried within 18 months, and those heading to superior court to be tried within 30 months. The decision is responsible for approximately 10,000 cases a year being thrown out, according to recent data from Statistics Canada.
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Meeting those deadlines can be tricky in complex white-collar crime cases, which take a long time to investigate. At the SFO, prosecutors receive information at the outset of a case, rather than being buried under stacks of evidence once an arrest has been made and the Jordan clock has started ticking.
“This seamless co-ordination is really a fundamental shift in how Ontario law enforcement encounters and addresses serious financial crime,” Supt. Spurrell said.
Cristie Ford, a professor at the University of British Columbia’s Peter A. Allard School of Law who specializes in financial regulation, said that addressing fraud requires even broader co-ordination, including internationally and with the private sector.
“I think it’s terrific that Crowns and police are co-ordinating, and I wonder if there’s room for some way to co-ordinate as well with telecoms and banks and internet service providers,” Ms. Ford said, pointing to the Canadian Anti-Scam Coalition as one such avenue.
Mr. DeBono pleaded guilty to one count of fraud over $5,000 and one count of money laundering and was sentenced to seven years in jail, minus the time he’d already served. Now out on parole, he has five years from the time of his release to pay back approximately $26.9-million or spend another seven years behind bars.
Det. Staff Sgt. Hanks remembers arresting him at the airport that day in September, 2020, as a satisfying moment, one she hoped would bring the victims some closure.
“Our victims had been waiting seven or eight years … just for somebody to be held accountable,” she said.