Yes, and I heard the same things when we were working on the CBC investigative piece, that the Toronto Police Service saw it as a big issue, but for some reason the RCMP didn't see it being as big an issue. I'm not saying one is better than the other.
But what really interested me when I started seven years ago at Equifax was the synthetic identities and synthetic crimes, because we knew they were starting to blossom. I would look at the various reports, working with local law enforcement in the various provinces, even in terms of some of the fictitious names they would come up with, such as “Robert Consumer”. At that time there were 100 or 200 reports that we'd be able to identify, working jointly with police, as being fictitious. That was seven years ago. That's increased exponentially every year, and we're up to 1,300 or 1,400 files on average per month using fictitious identities for non-existent people. We see it on the file. This individual ends up busting out, and they think they can leave the country and not pay their bills, but really they just open up a new identity.
We've even seen it in our walk-in centre. We have a walk-in centre just below my office in Toronto. You'll get an individual coming in with a driver's licence, and on the front they're a male, 35 years old, and when they swipe their driver's licence, it's a female reader on the back. So of course we notify law enforcement of that.
To us it's a real problem, and it's a billion-dollar problem.