GUYSBOROUGH — Despite living in some of Nova Scotia’s safest communities, residents of Guysborough County are reporting a “higher than normal” number of online extortions, harassments and threats, says local RCMP District Commander Sgt. Natasha Farrell.
“Overall, we’re not dealing with a lot of violent offences [here],” she told council for the Municipality of the District of Guysborough (MODG) at its regular monthly meeting July 17. “[But], we are getting a lot of online extortion, where people are reaching out to those who are using social media and saying, ‘Send me money, or I will send this photo to everybody on your contact list.’”
Farrell’s remarks came during her first-quarter (April-June, 2024) policing report of crime stats from the RCMP’s three county detachments: Guysborough, Canso, and Sherbrooke. According to the data, extortion, harassment and threat reports continues to hover at the four-year high of 16 set for the period last year – more than double 2022’s figure of seven.
“The public was really apprehensive at first to call us and let us know, because there was a bit of embarrassment associated with some of this,” she said. “So, it’s hard to tell whether there’s more of this actually happening, or if there’s more people recording it. But... [incidents] are flagged as higher than normal.”
Meanwhile, fraud was also up as Guysborough residents reported 44 per cent more scams – mostly online or by phone, between April and June of this year – than during the same period a year ago (13 incidents compared with nine). Like extortion and threats, increasing fraud numbers are “pretty typical of the rest of the province,” Farrell said.
According to a report prepared by the provincial RCMP’s divisional criminal analysis section for The Journal in 2022, Guysborough County residents lost $261,000 to phone, text and email scams – everything from special prize grifts to missing person swindles – in 2021. In two reported “romance cons,” criminals made off with $142,068 of the victim’s money.
“There’s hundreds and hundreds of different frauds and scams out there,” the RCMP’s financial crimes expert, Sgt. Andrew Joyce, told The Journal last year. “They are getting more sophisticated, and the technology is getting more sophisticated. Fraudsters can trick the victims into having a sense of trust, and they operate 24/7.”
Farrell noted that, since COVID, mental health issues in the county have been rising consistently.
“We’ve attended a lot of mental health calls, and our job under the [Nova Scotia] Involuntary Psychiatric Treatment Act is to bring those persons to hospital. We’ve been successful in the past week-and-a-half [on] two calls where we were thanked by family members for being compassionate and able to get their [relatives] the help that they needed.”
Other findings in the quarterly report included: An increase in the number of assaults (to 14, from 13 the year before), and break and enters (to five, from four); and a drop in sexual assaults (to zero, from two), and in theft over $5,000 (to one, from four).
