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Past Recipients

2018 Recipient: Mr. Barry Elliott for Project Chargeback

From left to right: Mr. Yves Riopel, Mr. Barry Elliott, Ms. Johanne Crampton (RCMP and head of the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre) and Mr. Dan Delaney

Mr. Barry Elliott is a retired Ontario Provincial Police Officer who worked in partnership with the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre (CAFC) to develop and implement a new anti-counterfeiting strategy to combat organized crime. Project Chargeback began back in 2011 with a goal to identify and disrupt suspect merchant accounts used to facilitate online intellectual property crimes.

Initially, the CAFC implemented a Merchant Account Disruption program which began as an informal partnership with Visa and MasterCard to share descriptor information from fraud complaints that involved credit cards as the payment method.

The success of this disruption program led the CAFC to expand the Merchant Account Disruption Program to include complaints that it was receiving on the deceptive marketing of counterfeit goods online. Mr. Elliott was instrumental in developing and maintaining a long working relationship with Visa, MasterCard and the Canadian banks. He created new partnerships with the Canadian companies experiencing losses due to the underground economy of counterfeit products as well as with international partners.

To date, Project Chargeback has registered over 10,000 confirmations where a chargeback occurred, and a victim was reimbursed. It has shut down well over 5,000 merchant accounts worldwide linked to counterfeiting, fraud and intellectual property theft. The victims recovered 100% of their loss, the fraudsters lost their sale and incurred a $25 chargeback, and the merchant account was terminated.

Other countries such as the United Kingdom, France, the United States., Switzerland, Italy, India and China have all shown an interest in implementing similar strategies following this model.