SUMA CEO Jean-Marc Nadeau speaking at Sparks 2025 earlier this year. (Facebook/SUMA)

By Nick Nielsen

SUMA CEO recommends education and vigilance for municipalities dealing with fraud

Oct 24, 2025 | 1:39 PM

After the community of White City and the RM of Edenwold were scammed out of nearly $700,000 from someone posing as the Water Security Agency, communities in Saskatchewan are being warned to be extra vigilant in their record keeping.

The Saskatchewan Urban Municipalities Association (SUMA) is doing their best to try and help Saskatchewan communities, according to CEO Jean-Marc Nadeau.

“It’s always challenging for municipalities because they represent the citizens, and they collect taxes and they want to do good with the money that they receive. So they always want to protect their assets the best they can. There’s lots of services out there to help with that and financial institutions have a number of stop-gap measures that they put in place. But internally, they (communities and RMs) need to have some specific policies as well to ensure that they can monitor those scam emails that come in.”

While he couldn’t provide specifics, Nadeau said that there have been other communities in Saskatchewan that have reached out to SUMA indicating similar fraud attempts but so far these communities have been able to fend off the attacks with little to no repercussions.

SUMA themselves are an advocacy group, so they can’t just pour money into security measures for the communities in the province. What they can do is try to educate their community leaders to try and keep these bad actors from taking advantage of local governments.

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“Every year we have learning opportunities, education sessions that we provide either at our convention every year or otherwise at other meetings that we’ll host, whether regional meetings and so on. We always bring somebody that has that kind of experience or talent and expertise. Insurance companies have now what they call cyber insurance. I think municipalities, although not cheap, when you’re facing down the barrel of a theft of $200,000 like White City reported, insurance are one of those services that you hate to pay, but boy, you’re happy when you have it. So, sometimes municipalities consider adding those to their protection.”

In the case of White City, Nadeau said that they realized they were being scammed when someone within their local government actually made a phone call to the organization the fraudsters were posing as. A former police officer, Nadeau said that even with services and software in place to try and prevent organizations from cybercrime, anyone with concerns should pick up the phone.

“My suggestion is, when you’re not quite sure, a few little flags come up, go with your gut feeling and certainly call the originating party of the email because that’s how they found out that this was a scam and a fraud. It’s easy to just rely on the email, but sometimes picking up the phone and calling the individuals to make sure that these emails are legit is always a good way of trying to protect yourself. Again, implementing some software, monitoring software helps for sure, and training your staff. I think those are the sort of three key things that I would recommend to anybody, not just municipalities, but anybody who delves in and works in the virtual world, as we tend to do nowadays.”

Attacks like this can have serious affects on some communities. For smaller and growing communities, fraudsters could hold up community and infrastructure projects that have been decades in the making.

“I recall one incident that I’m aware of, a municipality was attacked like that. It was a municipality of less than 1000 people and a significant amount of money, even beyond $200,000 as I understand, was I’ll say ‘stolen’ and luckily, they recovered. But the point is that it affects those municipalities excessively.”

To learn more about SUMA’s insurance recommendations for towns and municipalities, click here to head to their website.

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nick.nielsen@pattisonmedia.com