Good morning. The perpetrators of fraud have been shifting tactics. Instead of hacking into victims’ bank accounts – what bankers refer to as unauthorized fraud – they’re hatching elaborate schemes aimed at convincing their targets to send them money, engaging in what’s known as authorized fraud. That’s stirring up debate about who should bear financial responsibility for the losses. More on that below. But first:

Rescue: Three workers who were trapped in a remote northern B.C. mine have been rescued after more than 60 hours underground.

Trade: ‘A lot of work’ still needed in talks, Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic LeBlanc says after Washington meetings

Relief: Algoma Steel shareholder Barry Zekelman says Ottawa is acting like a “loan shark” over emergency funding

Federal Reserve: Donald Trump, Jerome Powell bicker over cost of U.S. Fed building renovations as the President visits the site

• Ottawa releases its budget balance today
• In Europe, consumer confidence surveys will be released

Hi. My name is Alexandra Posadzki, and I write about financial crime and cybercrime.

When Crystal Quast, a corporate communications professional from Waterloo, Ont., contacted me several months ago to share her story about a publishing scam, I was intrigued.

Having published a book myself fairly recently, I’ve received countless e-mails promising to help me sell more copies; my publicist had warned me that they are scams.

It was never entirely clear to me how such a scam worked or why scammers would be targeting authors, so when Quast offered to walk me through the self-publishing scam that had ensnared her, I eagerly agreed.

Quast had written a mystery novel and gone online looking for Amazon’s self-publishing arm. But the link that she clicked – one of the sponsored links at the top of Google’s search results – took her to an imposter company.

Quast caught on to the fact that she wasn’t really dealing with Amazon when she got back the first batch of edits on her manuscript – the company was charging $2,500 for a package that was supposed to include editing – and spotted glaring typos that had been overlooked. A friend who worked at Amazon subsequently confirmed her suspicions.

One of the things that I find most fascinating about the world of financial crime is the spot where its Venn diagram circle overlaps with that of the legitimate business world. As Quast’s experience illustrates, the impact of scams on the business ecosystem is broad, touching everything from companies like Amazon, whose brands are being abused, to the search engines helping scammers recruit victims, to the banks facilitating the fraudulent payments.

Fraud victims reported a total of $647-million in losses to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre last year. Meanwhile, the centre estimates that just 5 per cent to 10 per cent of frauds are reported.

And with so many players involved, the question of liability becomes complicated.

I spoke with Geoff Morton, senior director of fraud strategy at Royal Bank of Canada, about the shift from unauthorized to authorized fraud and the challenge it poses for banks.

According to Morton, the burden shouldn’t fall solely on the banks. Tackling authorized fraud requires collaboration between numerous parties, including telecom companies, social-media platforms, search engines and, importantly, customers, he told me: “We really need to bring everybody to the table.”

Some countries have taken novel approaches to tackling the issue.

In Britain, financial liability for authorized push payment scams, which occur when a customer is tricked into sending money to someone posing as a genuine payee, is split equally between the bank that sent the money and the one that received it.

Singapore has adopted what’s known as a waterfall model to determining who should bear the cost when a customer falls prey to a phishing attack. The financial institution is on the hook unless it can prove that it met all of its legal obligations to prevent the attack. The responsibility shifts next to the telecom, and finally to the victim.

Canada’s regulations are a patchwork, according to Sara Eve Levac, a lawyer and analyst at Montreal-based consumer advocacy Option consommateurs. For instance, the Bank Act limits the consumer’s liability for unauthorized credit-card transactions to $50. But for other modes of payment, such as a debit transaction, there’s no legal protection. Option consommateurs has been advocating for changes.

Quast, meanwhile, has received refunds on both of the credit cards she used to pay the Amazon publishing impersonators. But the experience of publishing her first novel, Dinked: Serenity Acres: Where Secrets Barely Stay Hidden, which should have been a joyous one, is now tainted with the shame of having been suckered into a scam.