Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to all members here for the opportunity to appear today on behalf of the Canadian Cyber Threat Exchange and the Canadian anti-scam coalition.
The Canadian anti-scam coalition is Canada's largest coordinated effort to fight scams, bringing together leaders in financial services, telecommunications and technology, alongside government, regulators and law enforcement. We do it because fraud is no longer a nuisance. It is the defining financial crime of our era. Each year, it affects millions of Canadians, costs billions of dollars and erodes public trust in our systems. This is not a trend. It is a persistent and growing threat.
I want to talk about three ways Canada can begin to turn this tide.
First, we need a genuine whole-of-society approach. Financial institutions, telecommunications companies, digital platforms, regulators, law enforcement and government must actively collaborate with shared objectives, coordinated policies and a focus on upstream prevention. Scammers do not respect organizational boundaries. Their operations move through telecom networks, banking systems and social media platforms and into the phones of Canadians every single day. No single organization can stop them alone.
Other countries have recognized this. The U.K. built Stop Scams UK, Australia created the National Anti-Scam Centre, and Singapore unified banks and telcos within a single operational framework. Canada has the will and the talent to do the same. What we need is the architecture.
Second, fraud must be understood as part of a broader cybercrime and money-laundering ecosystem. The same infrastructure used to steal credentials is used to commit fraud. The same networks used to launder drug proceeds are used to move stolen funds offshore. We need a coordinated approach that connects FINTRAC, the Canadian anti-fraud centre, cyber-defence functions and the private sector, and treats fraud as the common thread throughout them.
Third, and perhaps most urgently, fighting fraud depends on timely information sharing. Today, a bank, a telecommunications provider and a digital platform may each identify the same scam activity, yet there is no effective mechanism to share that intelligence in real time. As a result, each organization sees only part of the picture, while fraudsters share information instantly and exploit the gaps created by siloed systems and outdated regulations.
The Canadian anti-scam coalition was created in part to address this challenge, but we need legislative and regulatory frameworks that enable responsible information sharing. Other countries have taken this step. Canada can too, and we have an opportunity to lead.
The threat we face is not coming from opportunistic amateurs. These are organized criminal networks using sophisticated technology and professional operational models. If our response remains fragmented, we will continue to be outmanoeuvred.
Prevention must be our primary objective. That means real-time transaction intervention, network-level disruption of scam infrastructure and meaningful public education that reaches vulnerable Canadians where they are and in ways they can understand.
Canada has the opportunity to build a world-class response. We have an engaged private sector. We have law enforcement that understands the threat and wants to do more. What we need now is a framework that breaks down silos, enables real collaboration, provides meaningful resources where they are needed and puts prevention at its centre. The Canadian anti-scam coalition and the Canadian Cyber Threat Exchange stand ready to help build that framework.