In July 2023, Francine Jarry, an 85-year-old Montrealer, received a phone call from her granddaughter.
She was in trouble — arrested and mistakenly detained, she said. But the whole situation could be cleared up if Jarry paid $4,200 to bail her out.
“Right away when you get into a place like that, you’re in crisis mode,” she said. “And when it’s your grandchild that you’ve known since the day of birth … you’re really not thinking clearly.”
Jarry paid up. A masked man pretending to be a bailiff came to her house and collected the money.
It was an elaborate fraud, known as a grandparent scam. In Jarry’s case, the perpetrators were a group of Montreal-area men and women arrested in 2024 by Ontario Provincial Police and later convicted as part of an investigation called Project Sharp.
Nearly three years after Jarry was scammed, the woman who pretended to be her granddaughter, Erin Rud, was convicted of fraud over $5,000 for her role in the scam that targeted hundreds of victims. She was sentenced this year to 18 months to be served in the community.
Rud’s sentence includes house arrest, but with exceptions that allow her to leave the house multiple times a week to go to the gym, and, after six months, the conditions of the sentence only require her to be at home between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m.
To Jarry, the sentence feels like a slap on the wrist.
“To me, it’s a joke,” she said.
Victims like Jarry say Rud’s sentence and others recently imposed on convicted scammers are overly lenient, leaving them feeling let down by the justice system.
Anthony Quinn, president of the Canadian Association of Retired Persons (CARP), said his organization has been advocating for harsher sentences for scammers — particularly for those who take advantage of the elderly.
Even conservative estimates suggest scammers steal hundreds of millions of dollars from Canadians each year, most of them seniors. To Quinn, efforts to arrest and prosecute the perpetrators don’t match the scale of the problem, and, like Jarry, he feels light sentences give the public, and criminals, the impression that they can get away with few repercussions.
“If the law is so weak and has so few teeth that there’s no disincentive for the scammers, then what is Canada doing?” Quinn said.
“There’s a deterrent, and that’s part of our judicial system: you punish people because it deters others from committing those crimes and if those deterrents are so low, it’s worth the risk for the criminals to continue to perpetrate those scams.”
CARP has advocated that people who scam the elderly face punishments more in line with those imposed on people who commit crimes against children. To Quinn, it’s similar. Both involve taking advantage of victims because of their age and vulnerability.
In a recent case, similar to Jarry’s, a different group of Montrealers pleaded guilty to fraud charges in connection with a grandparent scam that targeted American seniors.
The men received prison time ranging from 20 months to 42 months — the longest sentence, which was imposed on the leader of the scam, David Anthony Di Rienzo.
The scam group defrauded their victims of hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to an agreed statement of fact.
In the end, Di Rienzo and the other men sentenced in Canada received less punitive sentences than Darlens Renard, one of the convicted money couriers who worked with the Di Rienzo group, but who was arrested and charged in the U.S.
Renard was sentenced to six and a half years in prison.
Lisa Kerr, an associate professor of law at Queen’s University, said discrepancies between the sentences are in part due to much harsher and more rigid sentencing guidelines in the U.S., particularly at the federal level.
“There is less focus on the potentially mitigating personal circumstances of offenders [in the U.S.],” Kerr said in an email. “Canada does not have sentencing guidelines and is more committed to discretionary and individualized sentencing. There is also more of a commitment to the restrained use of imprisonment than in the U.S.”
The U.S. also has a culture of more severe punishment, she said, which helps explain why it has one of the largest imprisonment rates in the world.
The sentences in the Di Rienzo case were also a result of joint submissions, where the prosecution and the defence agreed on a sentence.
Canadian judges are obliged to follow joint submissions unless they are considered contrary to the public interest — a high bar, according to Kerr.
How CBC investigated an alleged grandparent scam mogul
In a recent decision, which had nothing to do with fraud or grandparent scams, Quebec Superior Court Judge Dennis Galiatsatos criticized joint submissions as overly restrictive on judges. In that case, he said he would have imposed a 15-year sentence on a convicted fentanyl trafficker, but was forced to impose an eight-year joint recommendation.
Rud was charged and sentenced in Ontario. A spokesperson for the Ontario government said “criminals who take advantage of some of Ontario’s most vulnerable deserve to be behind bars” and highlighted efforts Ontario is making to call on the federal government to “reform Canada’s broken justice system.”
When she was sentenced in February, Rud was also ordered to reimburse $18,900 to three victims, including $4,200 to Jarry, but so far, Jarry said she hasn’t received a dime.
She said she reached out to the court in Ontario and was told there is no way to enforce the restitution order outside of Jarry filing a civil suit against her.
“I won’t hold my breath on that,” she said.
“It’s almost worse than the money, you know, and the reason I want to pursue this — I may never see this money — but I think the punishment and the sentencing is ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous.”
