Markham Fraud Over $5,000 Lawyer

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Fraud over $5,000 is one of the few non-violent charges in the Criminal Code that still carries a 14 year maximum, a preliminary inquiry right and automatic immigration consequences. These cases are not sprints. They are marathons measured in banker's boxes and terabytes, usually years in the making before anyone is arrested, and in York Region the entire course runs through one building in Newmarket. This page follows the long case stage by stage, from the investigation you may not know exists yet to the sentencing architecture at the end, and shows where document heavy prosecutions actually get beaten.

By Fadi Matthew Kazandji, Founding Partner, Kazandji Law. Serving Markham and York Region. Updated July 2026.

What makes fraud over $5,000 legally different

Section 380(1)(a) of the Criminal Code makes fraud a straight indictable offence when the value of the subject matter exceeds $5,000, or when it involves a testamentary instrument such as a will, whatever its value. There is no summary conviction route and no shortcut: the maximum is 14 years, which puts this charge in the same penalty class as some of the most serious offences in Canadian law. A related provision, s. 380(2), attaches the same 14 year maximum to frauds that affect the public market price of stocks, shares or merchandise.

Then there is the second line. Where the Crown proceeds by indictment and the total value of the frauds exceeds one million dollars, s. 380(1.1) requires a minimum sentence of two years in prison. That minimum remains in the Code, and on files at that scale it drives everything, because it takes discharges and conditional sentences off the board entirely.

The elements the Crown must prove do not change with the dollar figure, and the over against under comparison is mapped on our Markham fraud defence overview. The hybrid branch has its own page at Markham fraud under $5,000, and the provincial statutory picture sits on our Ontario fraud over $5,000 page and the wider Ontario fraud defence hub. What this page adds is the thing clients actually live through: the timeline.

Stage one: the investigation you may not know about

Big fraud files are built backwards from documents, and they are usually well advanced before the target hears a word. A bank's internal investigators trace transactions and quietly close accounts. An employer's forensic accountants rebuild ledgers over a winter. Investors compare notes until one of them files a report, either directly with York Regional Police, through YRP's online fraud reporting portal, or with the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, whose intake often routes back to the local force. By the time a complainant package reaches an investigator's desk, it can already hold years of statements, spreadsheets and emails.

From there, the police tools are paper tools. Production orders compel banks, processors and platforms to hand over account and transaction records. Search warrants reach homes, offices and devices, and YRP's Investigative Services, which includes an Organized Crime Bureau and dedicated Cybercrime and Digital Forensics units, handles the extraction and analysis on records heavy files. Markham addresses fall under 5 District at 8700 McCowan Road, but a large economic file is worked wherever the records lead.

Late in the build comes the call: would you like to come in and tell your side. By then the paper case usually exists, and the interview has one function, to supply the proof of knowledge and intent that documents alone cannot. Decline politely until you have counsel. The pre-charge window is also when a defence lawyer can sometimes shape the charging decision itself, by dealing with the investigator, correcting factual errors, and making targeted submissions before an information is sworn. Once charges are laid, those doors narrow.

Stage two: arrest, release and financial file bail at Newmarket

Fraud is not one of the offences the Criminal Code reserves for a Superior Court bail judge, so bail on a York Region fraud charge is dealt with at the Ontario Court of Justice inside the Newmarket courthouse at 50 Eagle Street West, the same building where the rest of the case will unfold. There is no separate bail facility the way there is in Toronto. Many people are released directly by police on an undertaking, and where a hearing is needed, it usually happens quickly.

Detention is rare on financial charges. The real contest is conditions. Expect the Crown to seek terms shaped for economic allegations: no contact with complainants and co-accused, no involvement in specified kinds of transactions or roles, sometimes banking or device restrictions, sometimes a surety, occasionally a passport surrender. Those conditions can quietly strangle a career in finance, real estate or management if nobody pushes back, and they can sit on you for years while a long case winds forward. We fight conditions as if they were part of the sentence, because in a marathon prosecution they function like one.

Conditions are also not carved in stone. As a long file evolves, terms that made sense at arrest can be varied on consent or reviewed, and part of managing a marathon case is revisiting them when they start costing you work, family time or health.

If you know charges are coming, a managed surrender arranged through counsel gets you processed and released on the best available terms, without a takedown at your workplace or in front of your family. It also starts the file with the Crown seeing organization on the defence side, which never hurts.

Stage three: disclosure by the banker's box and the terabyte

The Supreme Court's decision in R. v. Stinchcombe entitles you to everything relevant in the Crown's possession, and in a big fraud that word everything does real work. Bank records and production order returns. Complainant statements and will-says. Accounting exports, ledgers and audit trails. Imaged phones and laptops. Investigator notes. Disclosure in a document heavy fraud can run to hundreds of thousands of pages, and it rarely arrives at once. Rolling disclosure, produced in waves over months, is the norm, and a chronic source of delay.

Here is the uncomfortable truth about these files: they are usually won or lost in that pile. The complainant's summary is a theory. The raw records are the facts. We build the chronology and the transaction map ourselves rather than adopting the investigator's version, and that is routinely where the gaps appear: transfers with innocent explanations nobody asked about, authorizations the complainant forgot, accounting treatments that were normal practice in the industry, witnesses police never interviewed.

Organization is strategy. A defence that can put its hands on any document in seconds negotiates differently, cross-examines differently and litigates delay differently. And every gap in the Crown's production goes on the record in writing, because the disclosure history feeds directly into the constitutional clock discussed below.

Stage four: your election and the preliminary inquiry

Because fraud over $5,000 is indictable with a 14 year maximum, you choose your trial court: the Ontario Court of Justice, or the Superior Court of Justice before a judge alone or a judge and jury. And uniquely among most non-violent charges, that 14 year maximum preserves a preliminary inquiry. Under s. 535 of the Code, an accused who elects the Superior Court and requests one under s. 536(4) gets a hearing where the Crown's witnesses can be examined under oath before any trial begins.

In a fraud case, a prelim can be worth a great deal. It pins down the complainant and the lead investigator while the trial is still being designed. It forces the Crown to show how the paper theory actually runs through live witnesses. Occasionally it ends the case at the committal stage. And even where committal follows, the defence walks out knowing the case it has to meet, which changes the tone of every resolution discussion afterwards.

It is a genuine choice, not a default. A preliminary inquiry adds months to the timeline, and those months count differently under the delay framework. Where the documents already tell the whole story, a direct trial date in the Ontario Court of Justice is sometimes the sharper play. Either way, in York Region both levels of court sit at 50 Eagle Street West in Newmarket, so the strategic question is purely about forum and procedure, never geography.

Stage five: the Jordan clock and the particularly complex case fight

R. v. Jordan set presumptive constitutional ceilings for getting a criminal case to trial: 18 months in the provincial court and 30 months in the Superior Court, measured from the charge to the end of trial and net of delay caused by the defence. Blow through the ceiling and the charges are presumptively stayed. Large fraud prosecutions live closer to those ceilings than almost any other kind of case, because document volume slows every single stage.

The Crown's escape hatch is to argue that the prosecution is a particularly complex case whose time requirements justify exceeding the ceiling. Document heavy frauds are the classic battleground for that exception, and the fight is won or lost on a record built long before any application is filed. That is why we run long fraud files with one eye permanently on the clock: disclosure requests documented and dated, adjournments characterized correctly on the transcript, defence readiness stated on the record at every appearance.

Delay applications are not found at the end of a case. They are built from the first appearance. A defence team that manages the record properly puts real pressure on the Crown in exactly the kind of case where the Crown moves slowest.

Two more practical notes on the clock. Time you spend considering a resolution offer does not automatically count against the Crown, so decisions have to be made promptly and on advice. And a stay for delay ends the prosecution entirely, which is why Crowns facing a strong Jordan record often become far more reasonable about resolution than they were the year before.

What the Crown must prove, and where long case defences live

Underneath all the volume, the Crown's burden is the same as in any fraud: a dishonest act judged objectively, following R. v. Théroux and R. v. Zlatic; a deprivation, which includes putting money at risk without any actual loss, with R. v. Riesberry confirming that a sufficient causal connection to the risk is enough; and your subjective knowledge of both. Fourteen year files fail on those elements just like small ones do. The recurring defences:

• Authorization and honest belief. If you honestly believed you were entitled to deal with the money or property as you did, the mental element fails. Business records often support this better than complainants expect.
• No objectively dishonest means. Aggressive business decisions, optimistic projections and hard bargaining are not, by themselves, fraudulent means. The legal line is dishonesty, not failure.
• Causation gaps. The Crown must connect your act to the deprivation or the risk. In files with many actors and many transactions, that chain frequently has missing links.
• Quantum. The $5,000 threshold and the one million dollar minimum both make valuation a battlefield. Aggregation of separate incidents, gross against net figures, and speculative risk theories all get tested.
• Attribution inside organizations. Who directed the transaction, who knew what and when, whose login and signature actually moved the money. Titles are not proof of knowledge.
• Charter challenges. Production orders and device searches have legal preconditions, and exclusion of the electronic core of a fraud case can be fatal to the prosecution.

And where the allegation is really about property taken or kept rather than obtained by deception, theft and possession charges raise a different framework, covered on our Markham theft defence page.

If it ends in a conviction: the sentencing architecture for large fraud

Sentencing for fraud over $5,000 is structured by statute more than most offences. Section 380.1 gives judges a specific list of aggravating factors: the magnitude, complexity, duration and degree of planning of the fraud; any adverse effect on the Canadian economy or on investor confidence; a large number of victims; a significant impact on victims having regard to their personal circumstances, including age, health and financial situation; taking advantage of the high regard in which you were held in the community; failing to comply with a licensing requirement or professional standard; and concealing or destroying records. Subsection 380.1(2) then closes the traditional escape route: your employment, skills, status and reputation cannot mitigate where they were relevant to, contributed to or were used in committing the offence.

The money machinery runs alongside the jail question. Restitution up to the replacement value of the loss under s. 738. No relief just because you cannot pay, under s. 739.1. Civil enforcement of whatever goes unpaid, under s. 741. Add the s. 380.2 prohibition order, which can bar work, paid or volunteer, involving authority over other people's money, property or securities, an order that can outlast the sentence itself for anyone whose career touches funds or real estate.

As for the range: since the 2022 amendments to s. 742.1, a conditional sentence is legally available even for fraud over $5,000 where the fit sentence is under two years, and it is never available where the s. 380(1.1) million dollar minimum applies. Between those anchors, courts weigh denunciation and deterrence heavily in large trust based frauds. Scale, role, restitution and the trust relationship do most of the work, which is why the ground laid during the case, on quantum and on repayment, decides so much at the end of it.

The collateral file: your livelihood and your status

A 14 year maximum casts a long shadow outside the courtroom. For non-citizens it is the defining fact of the case: under the serious criminality provisions of immigration law, a conviction for an offence carrying a maximum of ten years or more makes both permanent residents and foreign nationals inadmissible, regardless of the sentence actually imposed. A short conditional sentence, even a fine, changes nothing about that consequence. For anyone without citizenship, immigration strategy is not an afterthought to the defence. It is a design constraint from day one, and it can dictate which resolutions are safe to accept and which are catastrophic despite looking lenient.

Careers carry their own exposure. Professionals face regulatory complaints that run parallel to the criminal case. Employers conduct their own investigations, and the bail conditions discussed above can restrict the very work that funds the defence. What you say in each forum can migrate to the others, so statements, hearings and resolutions have to be sequenced as one problem, not three.

Citizens face a version of this too. A fraud conviction is a criminal record that surfaces on employment and volunteer screening for years, and it can complicate entry to other countries, including the United States, in ways that outlast probation. None of that is an argument for panic. It is an argument for choosing the outcome you are aiming at deliberately, at the start of the case rather than the end of it.

If your charge arises in Toronto rather than York Region, the courts and logistics differ, and our Toronto fraud over $5,000 page covers that path.

Living under a long prosecution: work, family and the file

Nobody warns you about the middle of a big fraud case. The arrest is a shock, the trial is a date, but between them sit two or three years of ordinary life carried out under conditions, and that stretch is where clients struggle most. Some of it is practical. Your release terms may limit what work you can do or who you can speak to, so career decisions need legal input before you make them, not after. Travel usually remains possible but has to be squared with your conditions and, for non-citizens, with immigration advice. Money needs planning, because defending a document heavy case is a long project rather than a single bill.

Some of it is discipline. Keep a running file of your own: dates, conversations, anything you remember about the transactions in issue, new documents that surface. Memory fades faster than these prosecutions move, and the client who writes things down becomes one of the most useful witnesses in his own defence. Say nothing about the case to anyone but your lawyer, including online, including to the colleagues and friends you trust most, because friendly retellings have a way of arriving in disclosure with edges you never intended.

And some of it is patience with a purpose. A long timeline is not dead time. It is when disclosure gets mastered, experts get retained, quantum gets attacked and resolution positions ripen. The cases that end well in year three are almost always the ones that were worked properly in year one.

Why Kazandji Law for a long fraud case

A prosecution that runs for years tests a law firm's structure as much as its skill. At Kazandji Law you are not handed down to juniors after the retainer. Founding partner Fadi Matthew Kazandji carries the file personally from the pre-charge stage through disclosure, elections, pre-trials and trial at the Newmarket courthouse: one lawyer who knows every document, every transcript and every position the Crown has taken, for the entire life of the case. Our results across fraud and economic offence files are on our case successes page, and the rest of our York Region practice is set out on the Markham criminal defence hub.

We meet clients at whichever office is easiest: Thornhill at 7191 Yonge Street, Suite 310, minutes from Markham; Toronto at 180 John Street, Unit 320; North York; or Oakville. The first consultation is free and confidential, and it is worth having early, ideally before any interview, because the quietest stage of a big fraud case is the one where the most can still be changed.

Fraud over $5,000 FAQ

This page is legal information for people facing fraud over $5,000 allegations in Markham and York Region, it is not legal advice, and reading it does not create a lawyer-client relationship. Criminal Code provisions summarized here (including ss. 380, 380.1, 380.2, 535, 536, 738, 739.1, 741 and 742.1) were checked against the federal Justice Laws consolidation, and court, police and Crown practice details against Ontario, York Region and York Regional Police sources, as of July 2026. The law, local procedures and Crown practices change, and how any of this applies depends entirely on the facts of your case. For advice about your situation, call 647-588-3234 for a free consultation.