<h1>The Letter About Money You Weren't Expecting: How to Tell Genuine Contact From a Con</h1>
<p>The envelope looks ordinary enough. Your name is spelled correctly, the postmark is Canadian, and the letterhead belongs to a firm you've never heard of. Inside, someone you've never met suggests you may be entitled to money from an estate — or that an account bearing your family name has been sitting untouched for years. Your first instinct is almost certainly correct: be suspicious. Your second instinct, which is usually to throw the whole thing in the recycling and forget about it, is where things get complicated.</p>
<p>Canadians lost more than $638 million to fraud in 2024 according to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, across 108,878 reports and 34,621 confirmed victims — up from $578 million the previous year, and the agency estimates that only a small fraction of victims ever report it. The CAFC puts that figure at just 5 to 10 percent of true national losses, meaning the real total is likely several billion dollars. Reported losses have climbed nearly 300 percent since 2020, when they stood at roughly $165 million. Inheritance and lottery-style schemes have been part of that mix for decades, evolving from clumsy overseas emails into polished letters with real return addresses and convincing legal-sounding language. Skepticism isn't paranoia. It's the baseline.</p>
<p>But here's the uncomfortable other half of the picture. Provincial and territorial governments hold unclaimed property worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Alberta's registry alone held roughly 347,582 unclaimed items worth an estimated $154 million at last count, including a single balance valued at more than $850,000. The Bank of Canada holds unclaimed bank balances worth well over a billion dollars, some of them dating back to the 1900s. Estates get settled every week where a beneficiary genuinely cannot be located, and specialists are paid to find those people. Not every unexpected letter about money is a trap. Some of them are simply the paper trail catching up with you.</p>
<p>So how do you tell the difference without either handing your banking details to a stranger or accidentally binning something real? That's what this article sets out to answer. We'll start with why anyone would write to you in the first place, then work through reading the letter closely, checking the claim independently, and finally responding in a way that keeps you in control of the conversation. No single trick separates genuine from fraudulent. A sequence of small, deliberate steps does.</p>
<h2>Three Reasons Your Name Ended Up in Someone Else's File</h2>
<p>Unsolicited mail about money feels implausible because most of us assume our financial lives are self-contained. If money were owed to us, surely we'd know? In practice, there are only three realistic explanations for a letter like this, and understanding which categories exist makes the sorting job far easier.</p>
<p>The first is an estate with an unlocated relative. Someone dies without a will, or with a will naming a beneficiary whose whereabouts nobody knows. This is not a fringe scenario: an Angus Reid Institute survey found that half of Canadians have no will at all, while a further 13 percent hold one that is out of date, leaving only about 37 percent with current instructions in place. Families scatter across provinces and borders, names change through marriage or immigration, and a great-aunt in Winnipeg may genuinely have no idea that her cousin's branch of the family settled in Halifax three generations back. When an estate administrator hits that wall, tracing specialists get involved. <strong>Probate genealogists</strong> — sometimes called heir tracers or forensic genealogists — reconstruct family trees from records to identify and locate people entitled to a share. It is a commissioned service with an unglamorous client list of <a href="https://hedgedoc.info.uqam.ca/s/M8M7yykD5" target="_blank">municipal offices, pension administrators, insurers and share registrars</a>, which is worth knowing before you assume nobody would pay someone to look for you. Their letters land in mailboxes belonging to people who had no idea a distant relative had died.</p>
<p>The second is an asset that has drifted away from its owner. Canada is full of these. The Bank of Canada holds unclaimed bank balances transferred from federally regulated institutions after ten years of inactivity, some over a century old. Recent tallies put roughly 2.5 million individual balances on its books, worth in the region of $1.1 billion, with the oldest traced back to 1900 — and more than nine in ten are worth under $1,000, which is precisely why owners stop noticing them. Provinces including Alberta, British Columbia, Quebec, and New Brunswick run their own unclaimed property programs covering forgotten payroll deposits, insurance proceeds, utility deposits, and dormant credit union accounts. Add matured Canada Savings Bonds, orphaned share certificates from companies that merged three times since 1985, and pension entitlements tied to an address you left in 1998. Assets don't vanish. They just lose track of you — which is the entire argument for <a href="https://hedgedoc.ctf.mcgill.ca/s/p1SI11eVl" target="_blank">keeping a written list of your own institutions and account references</a> while you still remember them all.</p>
<p>The third explanation is that someone made the whole thing up.</p>
<h3>How your address got there in the first place</h3>
<p>None of these letters arrive by magic. Obituaries name surviving relatives and their cities of residence. Land registry records list property owners. Historical census returns become publicly available after 92 years. Vital statistics indexes, cemetery records, professional directories, and old phone books all leave traces. Anyone with patience and a subscription to a genealogy database can build a plausible connection between a surname, a city, and a mailing address — and it helps to know <a href="https://hedgedoc.ctf.mcgill.ca/s/7msdRr3V6" target="_blank">how those birth, marriage and death records were created in the first place</a>, because the same paper trail that carries a researcher toward you is the one you can walk back in the other direction.</p>
<p>That cuts both ways. The same public trail that lets a legitimate researcher find you lets a fraudster find you too. This is the point most people miss: the fact that a stranger knows your name, your approximate age, and where your family came from proves absolutely nothing. It doesn't confirm the letter is real, and it doesn't confirm it's fake. It confirms only that you exist on paper.</p>
<h3>Why the genuine and the fraudulent open the same way</h3>
<p>Both types of correspondence begin identically. Both arrive unannounced. Both mention money you weren't expecting. Both ask you to make contact.</p>
<p>That shared opening move is precisely why gut instinct fails here. A letter feeling "off" because it came out of nowhere tells you nothing, because coming out of nowhere is the defining feature of every letter in this category — the real ones included. Discarding everything unexpected means eventually discarding something legitimate. Trusting anything that looks official means eventually trusting something manufactured.</p>
<p>The envelope's arrival is not the signal. The contents are, and that's where we go next.</p>
<h2>What the Page Tells You Before You Check Anything</h2>
<p>Set the letter on the table and read it twice. Before you search a single company name or pick up the phone, the document itself will tell you a surprising amount — if you know which features carry weight and which are just decoration. Embossed letterhead, a scanned signature, and a reference number cost nothing to fabricate. Three other things are much harder to fake convincingly.</p>
<h3>Which direction is the money flowing?</h3>
<p>This is the single most useful question you can ask, and it resolves a large share of cases on its own.</p>
<p>Does the letter ask you to pay anything at all? Watch for administration fees, estate release charges, courier costs for documents, notarization fees payable in advance, currency conversion charges, or a "processing deposit" to open a file. Any request for money leaving your account before money arrives in it should end your interest immediately. There is no legitimate arrangement in which you must fund the release of your own inheritance. It is also worth knowing that every government unclaimed property program in Canada — the Bank of Canada registry included — is free both to search and to claim from, so an advance fee attached to "recovering" such funds contradicts how the system actually works.</p>
<p>Genuine tracing work runs the other way. Firms in this line are typically paid from the estate itself or take an agreed percentage of what the beneficiary actually receives, meaning nothing is owed unless money is recovered. A percentage-based fee is a commercial term you may or may not like, and you're entitled to negotiate or refuse it — but it is fundamentally different from being asked to wire $400 to Ontario before anything happens.</p>
<h3>Vague warmth versus checkable specifics</h3>
<p>Fraudulent letters trade in atmosphere. Real ones trade in facts.</p>
<p>Compare the language. A manufactured letter mentions "a distant relative," "a substantial sum," "a deceased client who shares your surname," and offers a Gmail or Outlook address for correspondence. Everything is emotionally suggestive and factually empty, because specifics are exactly what a recipient could verify.</p>
<p>Correspondence from probate genealogists reads very differently, and the reason is structural: the work produces named individuals and documented relationships, so the letter reflects that. Expect a named deceased person, a stated date and place of death, an explanation of how you might be related, a firm name with a street address and a landline, and often a request for a phone conversation rather than immediate paperwork. Some firms deliberately withhold the estate's value at first contact, which is normal and not a red flag on its own — but withholding the deceased's identity while pressing for your banking details is a different matter entirely.</p>
<h3>The pressure architecture</h3>
<p>Read the letter again for tone. Fraud depends on speed, because a person who takes a week to think loses interest.</p>
<p>Look for artificial deadlines: respond within seven days or forfeit your entitlement. Look for warnings that the funds will revert to the government imminently. Look for requests for confidentiality — do not discuss this with family members, other claimants may emerge. Look for insistence on immediate bank details, a void cheque, or copies of your passport in the first exchange.</p>
<p>Now apply the simplest test in this article. Set the letter aside for two weeks. Does anything in it suggest genuine harm from that delay?</p>
<p>Real estates move at the pace of paperwork, and inheritance claims routinely span months. Nor do unclaimed funds evaporate on a seven-day clock — <a href="https://www.unclaimedproperties.bankofcanada.ca/app/unclaimed-properties-bank-balances" target="_blank">the Bank of Canada holds balances under $1,000 for 30 years</a> and larger amounts for a full century before they are transferred to the federal government. Nothing dissolves because you thought about it over the holidays. If the letter cannot survive a fortnight in a drawer, it was never built to.</p>
<h2>Verifying the Claim Without Talking to Whoever Sent It</h2>
<p>You've read the letter closely and it hasn't disqualified itself. Now comes the step most people skip: confirming the story from sources that have nothing to do with the sender. The principle is simple. Information supplied by the person making the claim cannot be used to verify the claim. Everything you check must come from somewhere else.</p>
<h3>Where to look, free of charge</h3>
<p>Canada has no single national unclaimed estates register, so verification means checking several places depending on what the letter alleges.</p>
<p>The Bank of Canada's unclaimed balances registry is searchable online by name and covers dormant accounts from federally regulated banks and trust companies. Provincial programs exist separately — Alberta's Unclaimed Property Registry, British Columbia's Unclaimed Property Society, Quebec's Revenu Québec administration of unclaimed property, and New Brunswick's registry among them. Each is free to search, and none of them charge you to make a claim. These programs do return money: Alberta's registry has paid out $13.8 million to more than 8,500 owners since it launched in 2008, including roughly $1.4 million to 650 people in a single recent year.</p>
<p>For an estate claim specifically, most provinces publish probate or estate notices, and superior court registries hold records of estates in administration. Ontario, for example, maintains searchable estate court records. If a letter names a deceased person and a place of death, the existence of that death is usually confirmable through provincial vital statistics or a published obituary.</p>
<p>Then check the firm. Corporations Canada and provincial corporate registries will tell you whether a company legally exists, when it was incorporated, and who directs it. Professional bodies matter here too — reputable <em><strong><a href="https://estateresearch.ca/" target="_blank">probate genealogists</a></strong></em> often hold membership in organizations such as the Association of Professional Genealogists or the International Association of Professional Genealogists, and membership is verifiable directly through those bodies rather than through the firm's own website.</p>
<h3>The rule that protects you most</h3>
<p>Never use contact details supplied in the letter.</p>
<p>This deserves stating plainly because it feels rude, and rudeness is what fraud relies on. If the letterhead names a firm in Toronto, find that firm independently — through a corporate registry, a professional association directory, or a phone directory — and call the number you found, not the number they gave you. If both numbers match, excellent. You've confirmed something real.</p>
<p>Some related habits worth adopting:</p>
<ul>
<li>Ignore links and QR codes printed in the letter. They lead where the sender wants you to go, which may be a convincing replica of a legitimate firm's website.</li>
<li>Treat a prepaid reply envelope as neutral. It costs a few dollars and reassures people enormously, which is exactly why it's included.</li>
<li>Never confirm personal details to an inbound caller. If someone phones claiming to follow up on the letter, take their name, hang up, and call back on a number you sourced yourself. A legitimate researcher will find this entirely unremarkable.</li>
</ul>
<h3>When the results come back mixed</h3>
<p>Verification rarely produces a clean yes or no. Three ambiguous outcomes come up repeatedly.</p>
<p>The firm exists but you can't find the estate. This is common and not necessarily suspicious. Estate records aren't uniformly searchable across provinces, and an estate may be in early administration or held in another jurisdiction entirely. Ask the firm directly for the deceased's full name, date of death, and the court where the estate is filed — then check that yourself.</p>
<p>The estate exists but the firm doesn't. Treat this as a stop sign. Anyone can read a published notice and write to surnames listed in an obituary.</p>
<p>The firm exists, but something feels borrowed. Fraudsters clone real businesses — same name, slightly altered domain, different phone number, a mailing address that turns out to be a rented mailbox. Compare the address in your letter against the one in the corporate registry. Discrepancies of even one digit are the whole story.</p>
<h2>Replying Without Handing Over the Keys</h2>
<p>Verification tells you whether a claim is plausible. It rarely tells you everything, and at some point you may decide to respond. This is where most guidance falls silent, because the advice on offer is usually binary: trust it or bin it. There is a third option, and it's the one experienced correspondents use — reply, but control the sequence of what you reveal.</p>
<h3>Let them go first</h3>
<p>The instinct on picking up the phone is to be helpful. Someone asks whether your grandmother was born in Trois-Rivières, and you say yes, because she was, and because confirming a fact from 1931 feels harmless.</p>
<p>Flip it. Before confirming anything, ask them to state what they already believe. What is the deceased's full name? How do they think you're connected? Which side of the family, and through whom? A researcher who has actually built a tree can answer instantly and in detail, because that reconstruction is the entire product they're selling. Someone fishing will deflect, generalize, or turn the question back on you — "well, that's what we're hoping you can help us establish."</p>
<p>Then compare their account against what you independently know. If their version of your family matches records you hold and details they could not have guessed, that's meaningful corroboration. If it drifts to match whatever you say, you've learned something more useful still.</p>
<h3>Know which facts actually matter</h3>
<p>Not all personal information carries equal risk, and treating it all as equally sensitive makes normal conversation impossible.</p>
<p>Confirming a surname, a general region, or that a named person was indeed your great-uncle gives away very little. Most of it is already discoverable in public records — which is how the letter reached you.</p>
<p>The protected tier is different: your date of birth, your mother's maiden name, your Social Insurance Number, banking details, void cheques, images of your passport or driver's license, and your full residential address. These are the raw materials of identity theft, and there is no early-stage reason to supply them. Identity fraud and <a href="https://antifraudcentre-centreantifraude.ca/features-vedette/2026/02/month-prevention-mois-eng.htm" target="_blank">identity theft together account for tens of thousands of the reports the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre receives each year</a>, and they consistently rank among the most-reported categories in the country — which is why the request itself deserves scrutiny regardless of how the letter is framed. Documents proving your identity may eventually be required to receive a distribution from an estate, but that comes at the end of a verified process, usually through a lawyer or notary handling the estate — not in a second phone call with a researcher.</p>
<p>A useful line: "I'm happy to discuss the family connection. I'll provide identity documents once I've confirmed the estate through the court registry."</p>
<h3>Make it a household habit, not a one-off decision</h3>
<p>The lasting value here isn't in solving this particular letter. It's in never having to think this hard again.</p>
<p>Adopt a standing rule for unsolicited mail about money. Set it aside rather than acting on it. Mention it to a family member or friend — fraud thrives on isolation, and the request for secrecy is itself a tell. Check independently before responding. Reply in writing where possible, because written exchanges create a record and slow the pace to something you can manage.</p>
<p>This matters most for the people in your life who receive these letters most often. Older Canadians are disproportionately targeted: Canadians aged 60 and over lost nearly $180 million to fraud in 2024, the largest dollar loss of any age group and close to 40 percent of the national total. A family agreement that no financial correspondence gets answered alone is worth more than any individual red flag.</p>
<p>Correspondence from probate genealogists tends to survive this treatment comfortably. Genuine tracing work tolerates delay, questions, and verification, because the researcher's interest is in being confirmed. Manufactured claims collapse under exactly the same pressure — which is what makes the approach so useful.</p>
<h2>The Drawer Is Your Best Defense</h2>
<p>The most valuable tool in this entire process costs nothing and requires no expertise. It's a drawer, and two weeks.</p>
<p>Everything covered here — reading the money's direction, testing specifics against vagueness, checking corporate registries and unclaimed property databases, letting the sender speak first — depends on one thing: refusing to act at the speed the letter wants. Fraud is a business built on urgency. Legitimate estate work is a business built on documentation. Slowing down costs you nothing in the second case and saves you everything in the first.</p>
<p>So if a letter lands tomorrow, do three things. Put it away for a fortnight and see whether the urgency was real. When you return to it, spend twenty minutes searching the Bank of Canada registry, your provincial unclaimed property program, and the relevant corporate registry — none of which will ask you for a cent. Then, if the story still holds, respond on your terms: ask them what they know, confirm only what's already public, and hold your identity documents back until an estate is confirmed through a court registry.</p>
<p>Perhaps the question worth sitting with is this: how many people have shredded something genuine because it arrived the same way a scam would? Hundreds of millions of dollars sit unclaimed across this country, and a meaningful portion of it belongs to people who were contacted, assumed the worst, and never checked. The Bank of Canada's holdings alone have grown from about $245 million in 2004 to roughly $1.1 billion today — a pile that expands faster than it is claimed, year after year.</p>
<p>That's the real cost of pure reflex. Blanket suspicion feels safe, but it's just a different kind of guessing — and it happens to be the kind that leaves money on the table.</p>
<p>The skill isn't detecting fraud. It's declining to decide anything until you've looked. Whether a letter comes from an outright fabricator or from probate genealogists doing legitimate work, the process you follow is identical, and the outcome takes care of itself.</p>