The Toronto Phone Spoofers

This episode deals with financial fraud, elder targeting, and identity theft. There is no graphic content today, but if you or someone you love has ever been scammed, some of this might hit close to home. Take care of yourself, and feel free to skip this episode if you need to.

INTRODUCTION

It's a Wednesday morning in February 2025, in Rosedale, one of the most expensive neighbourhoods in the country. A grey-blue Porsche Cayenne rolls up outside a private school. A well-dressed couple gets out, walks their two boys to the door, says the usual goodbyes, and drives off.

Ten minutes later, on a quiet side street lined with century homes, a Toronto police cruiser pulls in behind them and flashes its lights.

Except it isn't Toronto police. Not really.

The moment the Porsche stops, unmarked cars close in from every direction. Officers pull both doors open. The man goes quiet and still. The woman does not. She tells the officers, loudly, that they have no idea what they're doing and they will regret this.

They will not regret this. They have been building toward this exact moment for almost 3 years, across 2 continents, using a stolen car report, a fake condo showing, and an undercover agent posing as a wealthy businessman from overseas.

I'm your host, Ryan Dell. This is Canadian CrimeCast: Coast to Coast True Crime.

Today's story isn't a murder. Nobody dies in this one. But by the time it's over, you'll understand why financial crime investigators call this kind of case one of the hardest things to build in Canadian law enforcement, and why a young couple with a red-brick Rosedale rental, two Range Rovers between them, and courtside Raptors tickets turned out to be two of the most prolific phone scammers this country has ever charged.

This is the story of Chakib Mansouri, Majdouline Alouah, and the RCMP officer who spent 3 years taking them down.

CHAPTER 1: THE COUPLE NOBODY COULD FIGURE OUT

On paper, Chakib Mansouri and Majdouline Alouah looked like a young power couple riding the wave of new money into old money's neighbourhood.

They moved into a red-brick rental on Castle Frank Crescent in Rosedale, the kind of tight-knit street with block parties and an unofficial "mayor." Mansouri drove a black Range Rover and wore a 2-tone Rolex. Alouah drove her own Porsche Cayenne and dressed head to toe in Prada, Fendi, Gucci, Dior, and other luxury brands. Online, Mansouri claimed he had an MBA from Concordia and described himself as a logistics executive working with "global giants." Alouah called herself a consultant and an entrepreneur and peppered her social media with hashtags like #selfmademillionaire.

They had 2 young sons who were friends with Drake's son at an exclusive day camp. The family sat courtside at Raptors games. In winter they skied Mont Tremblant. In summer it was brunch at the Ritz-Carlton and dinner under the CN Tower.

And yet, they were renters, not owners, in a neighbourhood full of owners. Neither of them appeared to hold a job. Alouah's Porsche sat buried in snow all winter, untouched. Mansouri's businesses, when you looked closely, were little more than names: a logistics company with a paragraph of corporate word-salad for a description, a company literally called "Grind Managment," misspelled, with no actual activity behind it. The neighbours rarely saw them up close. They didn't do small talk. They barely waved back.

Somebody was paying for all of this. It just wasn't obvious who, or how.

**POLICE PERSPECTIVE:** This is a pattern investigators are trained to notice, and it's a lot more common than people think. Lifestyle that doesn't match income is one of the oldest red flags in financial crime. It's not proof of anything on its own, plenty of people live beyond their visible means. But when you stack it with no verifiable employer, shell companies with no real operations, and a total avoidance of the neighbours who might ask questions, you start to see the shape of something. Fraud rarely announces itself. It just quietly doesn't add up, and the people who get away with it longest are usually the ones charming enough that nobody wants to be the one who asks.

CHAPTER 2: HOW THEY GOT HERE

To understand the Rosedale house, you have to go back almost a decade, to a mall in Windsor, Ontario.

**Around 2016.** Police are called to the Devonshire Mall in Windsor after 2 young people are spotted buying a large volume of gift cards with American Express cards at multiple stores. Officers find them inside a sporting goods store. The man, 19-year-old Chakib Mansouri, hands over a doctored ID under a fake surname. It doesn't match his face. In his wallet, officers also find an ID belonging to a woman named Majdouline Alouah, along with a stack of credit cards in other people's names. Mansouri is on probation at the time, already banned from possessing ID or credit cards that aren't his. He doesn't bother denying it. The woman with him, Alouah, tells police she and Mansouri came from Montreal "by GO train," a route that does not exist between the two cities. Officers find more gift cards and a hotel key hidden in her bra. She blames 2 men waiting outside in a black BMW. Those men are arrested too. A search warrant turns up forged credit cards, a card-press device used to manufacture them, a brand-new TV, luxury watches, a diamond ring, and a gold chain.

Both are released on bail. Alouah's conditions: return to Quebec, no contact with Mansouri, no bank cards that aren't in her own name.

**About 11 months later.** Alouah is arrested again, this time in Quebec, alongside Mansouri, in possession of counterfeit Visa cards. She still walks away with a conditional discharge.

**The years after.** The couple rents a one-bedroom condo in Montreal, telling the landlord they're restaurant workers who can easily cover $1,100 a month. They fall behind within 3 months. The landlord takes them to court. They abandon the unit anyway, leaving it trashed and the landlord out $3,300.

**2020.** According to RCMP financial analysts, this is the year the money really starts flowing, the beginning of what investigators would later calculate as 4 years of active fraud.

**The early 2020s.** Mansouri and Alouah marry, have 2 sons in quick succession, and move to Toronto. They settle into a $10,000-a-month, two-bedroom unit at the Shangri-La Residences downtown. They have discovered a tool that will change the scale of what they can do. It's called iSpoof.

CHAPTER 3: THE TOOL

In 2021, investigators at the Cyber Defence Alliance in London, a group of former law enforcement professionals who monitor emerging fraud on behalf of major banks, kept hearing one word over and over in criminal chatrooms: iSpoof.

What they found was a website, iSpoof.cc, with no listed owner, no contact information, and a cryptocurrency-only payment system. It let anyone alter what showed up on a target's caller ID, making a call look like it was coming from a bank, an insurance company, or a government office. It came with a slick dashboard, fake hold music, fake call-centre background noise, a feature to capture PINs as they were typed, and a "spy" mode that let the fraudster listen in on the target's side of the conversation in real time. Packages ranged from $170 for 150 minutes of use up to $850 a month for the top tier. At its peak, close to 60,000 people around the world were subscribed. Investigators estimated 20 new victims were being contacted every single minute, every day, for years.

The average loss per victim was about $16,000. 1 man lost $4.8 million.

British investigators traced the site's operator to a 35-year-old East Londoner named Tejay Fletcher, who had hired a freelance programmer to build it. Over roughly 16 months, iSpoof brought in close to $5 million, more than half of it landing in Fletcher's pocket, which he spent on a luxury flat, an $18,700 Rolex, a $390,000 Lamborghini, and matching $93,000 Range Rovers for himself and his girlfriend. In November 2022, London's Metropolitan Police arrested him. When they seized the iSpoof servers, they discovered the site's owners had lied about one thing: the logs weren't deleted at the end of every day like they'd promised customers. All of it was still there. Roughly 70 million rows of data. Close to 10 million fraudulent calls placed over the life of the site, about 40 percent targeting the US, 35 percent the UK, and the rest scattered across Canada, Ireland, Ukraine, Australia, and beyond.

Buried in that data was a single account, User 6485, who had logged over 18,000 minutes on the platform and targeted close to 1,300 people. The IP address traced back to Canada.

**POLICE PERSPECTIVE:** People assume sophisticated fraud requires sophisticated technology, deepfakes, AI voice cloning, that sort of thing. The truth is the phone remains one of the most effective tools in a scammer's kit precisely because it's so ordinary. Everybody answers the phone, or enough people do. And a tool like iSpoof doesn't need to fool a machine. It just needs to fool a scared, confused person for about 90 seconds, long enough to get a PIN or a password out of them before they've had time to think. That's not a technology problem. That's a human one, and it's why the fix isn't a better app, it's teaching people to hang up and call their bank back on a number they looked up themselves.

CHAPTER 4: THE SCRIPT

The mechanics of the scam were almost elegant in how simple they were.

Step one was buying data, usually stolen banking information acquired through phishing, text-based "smishing" campaigns, or purchased outright from dark-web brokers. Some lists even flagged people who'd already fallen for a scam once before, on the theory that a soft mark stays soft.

Step two was the call itself. Using iSpoof, the fraudster would dial the target with the bank's real name and number showing on the caller ID. An automated voice would read out the target's real name and address, list a few fake suspicious transactions, and ask them to press a button if none of it looked right. The target, understandably panicked, would press it. Then they'd be asked to key in their PIN to "verify" their identity. That PIN would appear on the fraudster's dashboard in real time.

This is where Mansouri came in. He'd take over the call personally, introducing himself as a bank representative, calm and reassuring. While the target was on the line, he'd simultaneously call the real bank on a second line, spoofing the target's own number, and claim he was locked out of his account. Whenever the bank asked for a detail he didn't have, he'd put them on hold, flip back to the panicked target, get the answer, and flip back. Within minutes he'd have control of the account.

RCMP analysts eventually obtained recordings of over 1,000 of these calls directly from the banks. Mansouri opened almost every one the same way. Casual. Unbothered. "Yes, hello." In one call, targeting a man near Innisfil, he used a stolen card to buy $4,469 worth of Versace clothing, then tried to move another $3,100 into a cryptocurrency exchange before the transaction got flagged. He talked his way past the bank rep with a joke about how good he'd gotten at this. In another call to HSBC, he nearly pulled off a full account takeover, right up until the rep asked a question he wasn't prepared for: his supposed wife's full name and date of birth. He stumbled, deflected, and hung up the second he was transferred to the fraud department. In a third, he impersonated a female client entirely, running a convincing voice all the way through, and walked away with $9,850 in stolen credit. He signed off that call the same way he signed off plenty of others.

"God bless you and your family," he told her.

CHAPTER 5: THE FILE LANDS ON A DESK

In the fall of 2022, User 6485's file crossed the desk of Corporal Erin Power of the RCMP's cybercrime investigative team in Toronto.

Power had come up through the RCMP the hard way. Her early years were spent in Labrador and then Nunavut, working sex crime and child exploitation cases, the kind of files that don't leave a person easily. She'd also weathered a brutal run of personal loss, several close family members diagnosed with cancer in quick succession. By 2021, she'd relocated to the GTA with her rescue dog and landed on the cyber team, at a moment when Canadian law enforcement was, by most accounts, losing ground to online fraud faster than it could keep up.

What she had to work with wasn't much. A phone number. An IP address. A stack of call logs. Her job was to turn that into a name.

RCMP intelligence analysts ran the phone number through open-source business records and got a hit: it was registered to a logistics company called Transport Inter-B, owned by a man named Chakib Mansouri. When Power's team ran that name through police databases, the Windsor arrest from years earlier came back up. A doctored ID. A stack of stolen credit cards. A pattern that looked a lot like the one they were now staring at, just with a much bigger price tag.

**POLICE PERSPECTIVE:** This is where a lot of people picture some dramatic technical breakthrough, and honestly, most of the time it's the opposite. It's a name on a business registration. It's a criminal record from years earlier that nobody thought to connect. Cybercrime investigation is, more often than not, old-fashioned detective work wearing a new coat. You follow the paper. You follow the money. Eventually a digital ghost turns into a person with a name, an address, and, usually, a history.

CHAPTER 6: THE STAKEOUT

Having a name wasn't enough. A good defence lawyer could argue the IP address had been hacked, or shared, or that somebody else entirely had made those calls. Power's team needed to catch Mansouri and Alouah in the act, ideally inside their own home.

**February 8, 2023.** Alouah flies into Pearson Airport from Turkey, where she'd had surgery, routed through Dubai. At customs, she lies about owning a moving company and refuses to give an address or phone number. She's let through anyway. RCMP surveillance teams are waiting outside. Mansouri picks her up in the Range Rover, but the surveillance car loses them in traffic downtown near Front and University.

Frustrated, the team turns to social media. Mansouri had posted a photo bragging about the underground car detailing service at his condo. Investigators matched it to a company that served the Shangri-La Residences. A follow-up post of the building's indoor pool sealed it. Power's team began quietly working the lobby and the street outside, watching the couple's comings and goings. At various points, as many as 60 investigators across multiple agencies were involved in the file.

**October 2023.** A break, and an odd one. Mansouri and Alouah's own landlord, fed up with them, had listed their unit for rent out of spite while they were still living there. Power and a colleague posed as a wealthy prospective buyer and a family friend touring the unit. Alouah, annoyed, refused to leave for the showing, which meant Power ended up walking through the apartment while Alouah sat right there in another room. Power photographed what she could, Mansouri's desk with its view straight down University Avenue, Alouah's walk-in closet stacked with designer shoes and hanging with high-fashion labels, and quietly noted the layout, the exits, and the absence of any security cameras or alarm system that would complicate a future entry.

CHAPTER 7: THE NIGHT THEY WENT IN

**November 4, 2023.** With Mansouri, Alouah, and their kids confirmed in Montreal visiting family, a team of 6 undercover RCMP officers entered the Shangri-La unit around 10:00 pm, quietly assisted by building staff bound by the terms of the warrant. Working in the dark to avoid drawing attention, a technical team copied laptops, phones, and other devices. By 4:00 am, everything had been returned to exactly where it was found, and the team was gone.

What analysts found afterward, back at RCMP offices in Milton, was staggering. Fraudulent documents. Fake passports. Templates for forging utility bills. Bank statements. Dozens of websites Mansouri had registered that mimicked real Canadian banks with a single letter changed, close enough that almost nobody would catch it at a glance. And a clear picture of where the stolen money went: some of it spent directly, on clothing and event tickets, but a large portion routed through online casinos to wash it clean, gambled just enough to satisfy anti-money-laundering checks, then withdrawn into a web of accounts opened under other people's stolen identities.

**May 2023,** several months earlier in the timeline but a crucial piece of the puzzle: Mansouri and Alouah's Range Rover was stolen while they were out for dinner. Mansouri reported it to police himself, in person, with an officer's body camera rolling the entire time. When Power's team eventually got hold of that footage, RCMP analysts ran a voice comparison against the bank recordings. It was a match. And while filling out the stolen vehicle report, Mansouri had helpfully written down his own unit number at the Shangri-La: 3505.

**November 2024.** With the case nearly ready, Power's team sent in an undercover operative to get closer than photographs and phone records ever could. Posing as a wealthy international businessman arriving with "Saudi money," the operative struck up a friendship with Mansouri over coffee in Yorkville, then dinner. Mansouri, eager to help a new friend, walked him through how to launder money using shell companies, and offered, if the operative handed over cryptocurrency, to hand back clean cash himself.

CHAPTER 8: THE EVIDENCE, EXPLAINED

By February 2025, Power's team had built one of the more thorough fraud cases in recent RCMP history. Here's what it was actually made of, piece by piece, and why each part mattered.

**First, the digital trail.** The IP address and phone number tied to User 6485 on the iSpoof platform led directly back to a business registered in Mansouri's name. On its own, that's circumstantial. It only becomes powerful once it's confirmed by everything else.

**Second, the voice.** RCMP analysts matched Mansouri's voice from over 1,000 bank fraud call recordings against an unrelated police body-camera recording of him reporting his own car stolen. This closed the biggest gap in the case: it proved the voice on the fraudulent calls belonged to Mansouri specifically, not just to whoever had access to his phone or Wi-Fi.

**Third, the financial pattern.** Banks confirmed that the client phone numbers Mansouri had called lined up almost perfectly with their own internal records of accounts that had been fraudulently accessed around those same dates and times.

**Fourth, the physical evidence.** The covert entry into the Shangri-La unit and the later search of the Castle Frank Crescent house turned up more than 40 electronic devices, forged identity documents, a card-press device for manufacturing counterfeit credit cards, dozens of fake banking websites, and stacks of cash hidden inside designer handbags.

**Fifth, the undercover confession.** An operative built a personal relationship with Mansouri over months and got him, on his own initiative, to describe and demonstrate his money-laundering methods, including his use of online casinos and cryptocurrency.

**Sixth, the lifestyle.** Neither Mansouri nor Alouah could account for a legitimate source of income. The businesses in their names were shell corporations with no real operations. Everything from the Rosedale rent to the designer wardrobe had to come from somewhere, and there was no legal explanation for where.

None of these pieces, on their own, would have been enough. A voice match without the calls means nothing. Bank records without a suspect's name mean nothing. But laid side by side, they left no other reasonable explanation standing.

**POLICE PERSPECTIVE:** What I want people to take from this case is that big fraud files rarely fall apart because of one dramatic piece of evidence. They get built the same way a wall gets built, one brick at a time, and every brick has to hold weight on its own before it gets added to the pile. The stolen car was luck. Everything else was 3 years of unglamorous, patient work. That's usually what separates the fraud cases that actually make it to a guilty plea from the ones that quietly die on somebody's desk.

CHAPTER 9: TAKEDOWN

The morning of the arrest, in February 2025, a surveillance team watched Mansouri and Alouah drop their 2 sons off at school in the Porsche. Minutes later, on a quiet Rosedale side street, a marked Toronto police cruiser pulled in behind them and flashed its lights, a deliberate misdirection. As the couple slowed to a stop, unmarked RCMP vehicles closed in from multiple directions, and officers pulled both of them from the car.

Mansouri went quietly. His first concern, according to investigators, was making sure his sons were looked after until his mother could arrive from Quebec, and he agreed to have a social worker step in temporarily. Alouah did not go quietly. She was, by every account, furious, insisting to officers that she'd done nothing wrong and that they would regret the arrest.

At the Castle Frank Crescent house, investigators seized more than 40 devices, a haul of credit cards, laptops, forged documents, a card-press device, SIM cards, USB drives, and bundles of cash tucked inside designer handbags, alongside a small mountain of high-end clothing and accessories from Fendi, Gucci, Burberry, Versace, Prada, Celine, Dolce and Gabbana, and a Rolex Datejust. The house itself told its own quiet story. It was cluttered and unkempt, and it was clear the couple had been sleeping in separate rooms for some time.

CHAPTER 10: THE BAIL FIGHT

Under Canadian law, bail is granted far more often than it's denied, and prosecutors generally have to make a compelling case for why someone should stay locked up before trial. Mansouri didn't even bother applying. Given the weight of the evidence against him, his lawyers appear to have decided it wasn't worth the fight.

Alouah's hearing was different, and it stretched over 2 days. The Crown argued she had a documented history of credit card fraud stretching back to the Windsor arrest, that she'd already violated bail conditions once before, and that she represented a serious flight risk. Alouah didn't help her own case. She interrupted repeatedly throughout the hearing, at times in tears, at one point losing her composure entirely and insulting the presiding judge to her face. She was denied bail and held in custody.

For Corporal Power, that outcome mattered beyond this single case. Standard bail conditions like reporting requirements or ankle monitors were built for a different kind of offender. As she put it afterward, an ankle bracelet won't stop someone from running a scam on a mobile phone. Alouah's detention set a precedent Crown attorneys could point to in future cybercrime cases, legal grounding for arguing that some fraud suspects need to stay behind bars simply because their crime doesn't require them to leave the house.

CHAPTER 11: THE PLEA

Facing a mountain of bank recordings, a voice match, seized devices full of forged documents, video and photography from inside their own apartment, and an undercover recording of Mansouri explaining his money-laundering operation in his own words, the couple's resolve to fight the charges didn't last.

On July 10, 2025, Chakib Mansouri and Majdouline Alouah pleaded guilty to fraud, money laundering, unauthorized use of a computer, unauthorized possession of credit card data, and possession of the proceeds of crime. Mansouri was sentenced to 4 years and 9 months. Alouah received 2 years and 9 months. They forfeited a condo Mansouri owned in Montreal. Both were granted a request to serve their time close to their sons, who were by then in the care of their grandparents.

Mansouri's situation remains unresolved in another sense entirely. He has no legal immigration status in Canada and is currently the subject of a deportation order, complicated by the fact that he has 2 Canadian-born children and by an ongoing government assessment of whether returning him to Algeria would put his life at risk.

By the time it was all totalled up, RCMP analysts determined Mansouri had personally contacted close to 1,300 victims, and that the couple had stolen roughly $1.8 million over 4 years while spending $2.1 million, a gap that doesn’t make sense when you hear it.  Investigators are careful to note those are only the amounts they could trace. The real total is almost certainly higher.

CHAPTER 12: THE BIGGER PICTURE

Mansouri and Alouah were 2 people. iSpoof, the tool they used, had close to 60,000 users worldwide.

Once Tejay Fletcher's prosecution was underway in the UK, London's Metropolitan Police shared leads with law enforcement agencies around the globe, including the FBI, the US Secret Service, the Dutch National Police, Europol, France's Gendarmerie, Germany's federal police, and agencies in Ireland, Ukraine, Belgium, and Lithuania. That coordinated effort, called Operation Elaborate, has led to roughly 180 arrests worldwide, with more investigations still active. It remains one of the largest fraud investigations in Metropolitan Police history.

Fletcher himself was sentenced to 13 years. His lawyers argued for leniency, citing a difficult upbringing and a lifelong struggle with depression and anxiety. The judge wasn't moved, telling him plainly that his remorse looked a lot more like regret at getting caught than empathy for the people he'd hurt.

In the aftermath, London police set out to notify roughly 70,000 UK residents who'd been targeted through iSpoof, some of whom had no idea they'd ever been a target at all.

Here in Canada, the numbers are just as sobering. According to the Angus Reid Institute, 80 percent of Canadians have been targeted by a phone scam at least once. In a single 9-month stretch, phone scams reported to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre accounted for more than $71 million in losses, and because as few as 5 to 10 percent of frauds ever get reported, the real total is likely closer to $1.4 billion. In 2024 alone, the centre processed nearly 50,000 reports representing over 34,000 victims and $638 million in losses.

EPILOGUE

I keep coming back to something Corporal Power said about this case: an ankle bracelet won't stop someone from running a scam on a mobile phone. It's a small line, but it points at something bigger. The tools we've built to punish and monitor crime were mostly designed for crime that happens in a physical place, and fraud increasingly happens in cyber space.

That's really the whole story here, isn't it. Like victims in my previous episodes, they trusted a voice that sounded like it was on their side. Mansouri understood that instinct as well as any conman in this show's history, he just didn't need a screwdriver or a parking lot to exploit it. He needed a phone, a spoofed number, and about 90 seconds of somebody's fear.

If there's a practical takeaway here, it's this. If you get a call or a text claiming to be your bank, your government, or the police, telling you something is wrong with your account, hang up. Call the number on the back of your own card, or look up the institution yourself. Never give a PIN, a password, or a one-time code to anyone who called you first. And if you think you or someone you know has been targeted, the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre will take your reports. As the RCMP put it themselves, the best thing any of us can do is learn to be cyber safe, because the person on the other end of that call is counting on you not to hang up.

Before I let you go, I want to say something about the investigators on a case like this one. There's no dramatic rescue at the end of a fraud file. Nobody gets pulled out of a burning building. It's 3 years of surveillance logs, warrant applications, and copying hard drives at 3:00 in the morning while somebody's family sleeps in another country. Corporal Power built this case while fighting her own serious health battle in the middle of it, largely in private, and kept working it anyway. That's not the kind of sacrifice that makes headlines, but it's real, and it's the reason 1,300 people got some measure of justice. To her, and to everyone on that team, thank you.

This episode was written, researched, and produced by me, Ryan Dell. If you liked what you heard, please take a moment to give the show a 5-star review. These episodes are ad free, and leaving a review takes less time than listening to the ads other podcasts make you sit through. It helps the podcast grow, and it helps other people find these stories.

I love hearing from you. If there's a case you think I should cover, send me an email. My address is: canadiancrimecast@gmail.com.

I'm Ryan Dell, and this is Canadian CrimeCast: Coast to Coast True Crime.

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*Sources: Malcolm Johnston, "The Phone Scammers Next Door," Toronto Life; Reagan McSwain, "RCMP charge Toronto couple after 570 Canadians lose millions to spoofed caller IDs," Toronto Star, February 20, 2025; Paul Monteith, "How the RCMP took down prolific cyber fraudsters," October 30, 2025.*