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Article · Justice · 5 min read

Fraud used to be solved like a violent crime. Now it almost never is.

In 1998, Canadian police cleared 60% of reported frauds — on par with how often they cleared a sexual assault that year. By 2024, that number is 10.6%, the largest decline of any offence among the 17 major categories we examined. It's happening against a backdrop of its own: the national violent-crime clearance rate just hit its lowest point in 27 years of data.

Published 4 August 2026 · Open Data Canada Sources Statistics Canada tables 35-10-0177 and 35-10-0026
Illustrative image of a fraud case file stamped FRAUD on a desk with a magnifying glass, scattered financial documents, and a small Canadian flag.
Illustrative image, AI-generated. Not a photograph of an actual case file.

The story

Line chart showing Canada's fraud clearance rate falling from 60% in 1998 to 11% in 2024, with other property crime types shown flat in the background for comparison.

Fraud's police clearance rate, Canada, 1998–2024, against four other major property offences. Fraud started well above them; by 2024 it had fallen to the bottom of the pack. Data: Statistics Canada table 35-10-0177.

In 2024, Canadians reported 182,696 frauds to police. 19,313 were cleared — by charge or otherwise. That's a 10.6% clearance rate. In 1998, the same calculation gave 60.2%: a majority of reported frauds got resolved, a rate closer to how assault or robbery were cleared than to how break-ins or car theft were cleared. Twenty-six years later, fraud clears about as poorly as the worst-performing property crimes here — on par with motor vehicle theft (9.8%) and theft over $5,000 (9.4%), and worse than break-ins (19.4%) or arson (15.3%).

The decline wasn't one event. It ran through nearly every year of the 27-year series: steep in the early 2000s (60% to 44% by 2003), a slower slide to 30% by 2014, then nearly half again in the last six years, from 21% in 2018 to 10.6% in 2024.

Is this just more fraud than police can keep up with?

Two-panel chart. Top panel: fraud incidents reported versus cases cleared, Canada, 1998-2024, in raw counts, showing incidents flat then surging past 180,000 by 2024 while cleared cases fall and then flatten near 20,000. Bottom panel: the resulting clearance rate falling from 60% to 11%.

Split the 27 years in two and the "just more fraud" case gets weaker, not stronger. From 1998 to 2014, reported fraud was flat-to-down (94,819 to 81,179 incidents, −14%), yet the number of cases cleared fell by more than half (57,072 to 24,072, −58%). Police weren't being swamped by more fraud in this period. Clearances per incident just kept falling regardless of volume. From 2014 to 2024, the picture flips: reported incidents more than doubled (81,179 to 182,696, +125%), while cases cleared actually fell (24,072 to 19,313, −20%), a much smaller move set against a fast-growing pool of reports. That decade genuinely does look like police clearing about the same number of cases each year regardless of how much fraud was reported.

Neither factor on its own produces today's 10.6%. If police still cleared 57,072 cases a year (the 1998 pace) against 2024's incident volume, the rate would be 31.2%. If incident volume had stayed at the 1998 level but clearances still fell the way they did, it'd be 20.4%. Getting to where fraud is now takes both: a real decline in cases cleared and a surge in cases reported.

We can't say from this data alone why clearances per incident kept falling even when volume didn't. A shift in fraud's mix toward harder-to-solve online and cross-border scams plausibly matters, as does how forces prioritize fraud investigations against violent crime, and resourcing. So does definitional churn: StatCan revised its "founded incident" rules in 2018, and its own release notes flag data-quality issues in at least one major service's 2024 fraud count. This table can't distinguish between any of them. What the data does show is that "there's just more fraud now" is at most half the story.

Violent-crime clearance is at its lowest point in 27 years too

Fraud isn't declining in isolation. Canada's national violent weighted clearance rate peaked at 64.1% in 2014 and has fallen almost every year since, to 54.1% in 2024 — the lowest point in the 27-year series, below even 1998's 55.7%. The all-crime weighted clearance rate (which blends in property crime, including fraud) tells a different story: it peaked a year earlier, in 2013 at 41.0%, and has also fallen to 35.8% in 2024 — down, but not a record low. 2003 and 2004 were both lower, near 33.5%.

Line chart of Canada's national violent weighted clearance rate and all-crime weighted clearance rate, 1998-2024. Violent clearance peaks at 64.1% in 2014 and falls to an all-time-series low of 54.1% in 2024. All-crime clearance peaks at 41.0% in 2013 and falls to 35.8% in 2024, above its 2003-2004 low.

Fraud's collapse is unfolding inside that same decline: a 27-year low for violent-crime clearance, even as overall crime-solving, down from its own peak, remains above its 2003–2004 low.

Underneath the "all crime" line, Open Data Canada looked at 17 major offence categories individually. Fraud's –49.6-point decline since 1998 is the largest single move in the data, by a wide margin — the next-largest declines are sexual assault level 1 (–17.7 points) and assault level 1 (–17.1 points). Most crimes against the person (assault level 1, sexual assault level 1, uttering threats, criminal harassment) fell substantially over the period, breaking downward within a few years of the 2014 violent-crime peak. Homicide and aggravated assault (level 3) are essentially flat across all 27 years (within 1.5 points either way). Five categories improved: attempted murder, breaking and entering and mischief modestly (+3 to +5 points), and robbery and sexual assault (level 2) more substantially (+9.5 and +12.8 points). The full offence-by-offence picture is below, for readers who want to see how fraud compares to every category we checked, not just the property-crime lines on the hero chart.

Small-multiples grid of 17 line charts, one per major offence type, each showing that offence's police clearance rate from 1998 to 2024, sorted from largest decline to largest improvement. Fraud's panel shows the steepest fall.

How this relates to our other clearance-rate coverage

This piece draws on the same StatCan program (Uniform Crime Reporting Survey) as "More cops, less crime?" (May 2026), which used the all-crime weighted clearance rate at the metro level — a different geography-based question from this one. What's new here is the offence-by-offence breakdown underneath the national number, and specifically that fraud, not any violent offence, has seen the single largest clearance-rate decline in the data.

Method and limits

  • Fraud and offence-level metric: cases StatCan codes "Total cleared" ÷ "Actual incidents," by offence type, Canada, 1998 vs. 2024 (table 35-10-0177). "Cleared" includes both cleared by charge and cleared otherwise (e.g., the accused died, the complainant declined to proceed) — it is not a charge or conviction rate. This is a simple ratio, not the same as StatCan's published severity-weighted "clearance rate" used in our other coverage (that cube doesn't publish a weighted rate per individual offence, only raw incident and cleared counts).
  • National trend metric: StatCan's published weighted clearance rate, violent and all-crime, Canada, 1998–2024 (table 35-10-0026) — this one is severity-weighted, unlike the offence-level figures above. Don't quote the two as directly comparable.
  • Offence selection (small-multiples chart): 17 offences chosen for public recognizability out of 314 detailed violation codes in the source cube — not exhaustive.
  • Not shown: why. See "Is this just more fraud than police can keep up with?" above — several plausible contributors to fraud's decline exist and none is isolated here.

Data queried from the Statistics Canada Web Data Service. Charts built in Python with Matplotlib.

Data sources

  • Statistics Canada, Table 35-10-0177-01 — Incident-based crime statistics, by detailed violations, Canada (1998–2024)
  • Statistics Canada, Table 35-10-0026-01 — Crime severity index and weighted clearance rates, national and CMA (1998–2024)