lucky rainbow Online Credit Unions Offering High Interest Rates on Savings May Be Fakes

You’re reading the Canada Letter newsletter.  Backstories and analysis from our Canadian correspondents, plus a handpicked selection of our recent Canada-related coverage. Get it sent to your inbox.

The dazzling white lobby of the office tower at 99 Bank Street in Ottawa certainly looks like a place where you’d find the headquarters of a financial institution. But up on the floor that Ottawa Credit Union’s elaborate website lists as the location of the company’s head office, there’s only a federal government agency.

ImageAn unregistered credit union is nowhere to be found in the Ottawa office tower listed online as its headquarters.Credit...Ian Austen/The New York Times

This week, the Financial Services Regulatory Authority of Ontario formally warned consumers that Ottawa Credit Union is not, as is required by law, registered with the province. It’s the third such warning about online sites claiming to be credit unions that the financial industry regulator has put out in just over two years.

“We attempted to contact the business to inform them they were required by law to cease operations,” Russ Courtney, a spokesman for the agency, wrote in an email to me. “We reached out by phone, email and registered mail but were unsuccessful.”

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Both Ottawa Credit Union and Sunray Credit Union live on online and continue to pop up in Google searches. (The third phantom organization that the government warned about, HonoUno Credit Union, seems to have vanished.) My efforts to contact them were no more successful than the regulator’s.

At first glance, their sites look like those of most financial institutions, although they promise alluring interest rates of 9 percent or more on savings accounts.

Subscribe to The Times to read as many articles as you like.lucky rainbow

• lucky rainbow
• Online
• Credit
• Offering
• Unions