Bonny Belanger:
The Woman Keeping
Oceanside Safe Online

Bonny Belanger is not a cybersecurity expert in the way you might picture one — no dark office, no glowing monitors, no arcane jargon. She runs Parksville Tech out of a local office, and she spends a significant chunk of her time sitting at the kitchen tables of Oceanside seniors, walking them through the digital world one step at a time.

That work, it turns out, puts her at the front line of one of the most serious crime waves currently hitting our community.

"Seniors are not naive," she told PQBVoice.ca during a conversation recorded for The Grateful Immigrant. "They're trusting. And scammers know exactly how to exploit trust."

Why Seniors Are Target Number One

The statistics back her up. Fraud targeting older Canadians has climbed year over year, and Parksville and Qualicum Beach — communities with a higher-than-average senior population — are feeling it acutely. In the week of April 20–26, 2026 alone, Oceanside RCMP logged 284 complaints. Three residents lost a combined $29,000 in that single seven-day period.

Belanger has watched this pattern develop up close. The scams that hit hardest in Oceanside — the fake bank calls, the "relative in trouble" schemes, the romance scams — all share a common thread. They manufacture urgency, they exploit trust, and they target people who grew up in a world where a voice on the phone from someone claiming authority was, generally, trustworthy.

What Parksville Tech Is Doing About It

Parksville Tech's approach is deliberately low-tech in one sense: they go to where seniors are, rather than expecting seniors to come to them. Kitchen table visits. Drop-in sessions at community centres. Phone calls with clients who just need someone patient to walk them through what they're looking at on their screen.

The goal is not to make seniors afraid of technology. It's the opposite. Belanger's philosophy is that confidence — real, informed confidence — is the best protection against fraud. If you understand how a bank actually communicates with its customers, you're far less likely to be fooled by someone pretending to be one.

That means knowing the basics: your bank will never ask you to move money to a "safe" account. No legitimate company will ask you to buy gift cards to pay a debt. A grandchild in trouble will never ask you to keep the call secret from the rest of the family.

The Connection to the Fraud Files

PQBVoice.ca has been tracking fraud in Parksville and Qualicum Beach since launch. The Oceanside Fraud Files — starting with the Finholm Fake-Out — documents the scams targeting our community in real time. Belanger's work is, in many ways, the community response to the same problem.

What struck us most in our conversation was not the scale of the problem — though it is significant — but the simplicity of what works. Awareness. Conversation. Telling your parents, your neighbours, your friends: here is what these scams look like, here is what to listen for, here is what to do when something feels wrong.

A Note on This Episode

This is Episode 01 of The Grateful Immigrant with Julio Garcia — PQBVoice.ca's flagship interview show. The episode was recorded in Parksville and covers Bonny's background, her path to founding Parksville Tech, the current state of cybercrime in Oceanside, and the practical steps anyone can take today to protect themselves and their families.

The video is published above. Subscribe to the PQB Briefing newsletter to be notified when new episodes drop.