Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Good afternoon. Thanks to all of you for the opportunity to appear before the committee today. My name is Jon Camfield. I lead our global trust and safety policy work on fraud and scams. Joining me is my colleague Rachel Curran, director of public policy of Canada at Meta.
Meta takes the threat of fraud and scams seriously. Financially motivated criminal actors are among the most persistent and agile threats we face online today. These networks operate across platforms, exploit multiple sectors and often operate with impunity from jurisdictions with limited rule of law.
In 2025 alone, we enforced on over 10 million accounts linked to criminal scam centres, which are organized criminal organizations that traffic and exploit people to run scam operations at an industrial scale. There are hundreds of thousands of victims driving these scams. We invest significantly in detecting and removing fraudulent actors and content, and we maintain active partnerships with Canadian law enforcement, regulators and industry to combat fraud.
Our approach is multi-layered and outcomes-driven.
We have dedicated policies on fraud, scams and deceptive practices for all of our platforms—Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Messenger and WhatsApp—and also across all of them on ads. In 2025, we removed more than 159 million ads globally for violating these policies. We removed 92% of them proactively before they were reported to us. Overall, we achieved greater than a 50% reduction in scam ad reports across our platforms in the same time period.
In addition to policy enforcement, we're continuously strengthening efforts on our platforms to deter these scammers. Here are some examples. First, we are expanding advertiser verification, with a goal of 90% of our ads revenue coming from verified advertisers by the end of 2026, up from 70% at the end of 2025. Second, we deploy advanced AI tools to prevent scammers from misusing the images of public figures to bait people into fraudulent ads. Third, on Messenger, we are also rolling out on-device AI to detect scam patterns inside conversations and warn users in real time, even within end-to-end encrypted chats.
As the government develops Canada's first-ever anti-fraud strategy, it is imperative to remember that cross-sectoral collaboration is essential. No single company or sector can see the full fraud attack chain. A consumer may first encounter a scam on SMS or on social media, or they may be moved through a phone call or a fraudulent investment site and ultimately lose money through a crypto or bank transfer. Each sector has a limited view, with no one company or platform seeing that complete picture. Effective disruption therefore requires sharing intelligence across these boundaries.
That is why Meta invests heavily in cross-sector information sharing. Through the fraud intelligence reciprocal exchange, or FIRE, we exchange signals bidirectionally with financial institutions, enabling faster enforcement. Through the Global Signal Exchange, we share structured scam indicators—URLs for malicious websites, phone numbers and also ad accounts—with governments and industry across multiple jurisdictions around the world. Government entities are able to participate within GSE at no cost.
Here in Canada, Meta supports the stand against scams campaign alongside the Canadian Bankers Association. We maintain dedicated reporting channels with the Canadian anti-fraud centre, the RCMP, the Canadian Securities Administrators investment fraud task force and the Competition Bureau.
We participated in Operation Maple Disruption with Canadian law enforcement, securities regulators and financial institutions. Alongside Canada, Meta has similarly endorsed the UNODC's global public-private partnership framework against fraud. We're also founding signatories to the Industry Accord Against Online Scams and Fraud with Google, Amazon, Microsoft, OpenAI and many others.
As Parliament considers how best to protect Canadians from fraud, we encourage three actions. The first is a whole-of-ecosystem approach that brings all sectors of the fraud attack chain to the table from the outset: digital platforms, telecoms, financial institutions, fintech and law enforcement. The second is strong information-sharing frameworks with legal safe harbour protections so companies can collaborate in good faith without fear of liability under privacy or competition law. The final one is an outcomes-focused framework that measures results rather than mandating specific methods, allowing all of us to remain as agile as possible as fraud tactics evolve rapidly.
Thank you for your time today. We welcome questions.