Industry and Technology Committee on June 8th, 2026

[Jon Camfield]

It is a challenge. The scammers we deal with today are, as I said, the most adversarial we face online, including nation-state actors and espionage and spyware actors. They are industrialized and scaled in a form that's hard to put into words.

It's important to think about the jurisdictions they most often come from. We're talking about hundreds of thousands of victims who've been trafficked and are beaten if they do not scam and meet their quotas. We're talking about places where the GDP of the countries they're operating from is 40% driven by scam activity, not just on our platform but on all platforms around the world. They have a high incentive and low accountability for what they do and how hard they do it.

The challenge is how you deal with such a scaled, determined and financially empowered adversary. We deal with disruptions. We deal with product change to make our products more hostile to scammers without raising barriers to normal users or legitimate businesses. It's a difficult balance, but we do invest heavily. We take the threat seriously.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ben Carr]

Mr. Ntumba, unfortunately, your time is up. Thank you.

Mr. Ste‑Marie, the floor is yours, sir, for six minutes.

[Gabriel Ste-Marie, Bloc, Joliette—Manawan, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Greetings to all my colleagues. I'm sorry I can only be with you virtually.

I want to thank the four witnesses for joining us. I'm very grateful to them.

Mr. Shipley, you ended your opening remarks by suggesting a question that we could ask Meta.

Could you repeat it for us?

[David Shipley]

I would love to know what Meta estimates is the value and number of fraudulent ads targeting Canadians.

[Gabriel Ste-Marie, Bloc, Joliette—Manawan, QC]

Could the Meta representatives respond?

[Jon Camfield]

I regret to say that I do not have those numbers, but I can look into them and get back to you.

[Gabriel Ste-Marie, Bloc, Joliette—Manawan, QC]

Okay.

The committee would appreciate it if you could send us the numbers. Thank you very much.

On May 11, Le Journal de Montréal's investigative bureau published a report on how Quebeckers are losing a lot of money to deepfakes on Facebook. Fake videos of Mark Carney, François Legault, Doug Ford and influencers are showing up on social media. There are even fake videos of Keanu Reeves and people like that. Le Journal de Montréal spoke to four people about their experience. Two of them had lost more than $100,000. I don't know if you heard about that article or that investigation. The journalists said they had contacted Meta, but it declined to speak to Le Journal de Montréal.

What do you have to say to the people who were taken in by deepfakes posted on your platforms? Many of them have lost their life savings, their retirement savings.

[Jon Camfield]

It is horrible. These crimes are horrific, and it is deeply troubling to see that type of loss in any situation, but particularly from retirement savings as people are looking towards being done and being retired. That is horrific. We don't want to see these types of actions coming from our sites.

We do everything we can to detect deepfakes and to detect celeb bait being used in our ads and on our platforms. We've deployed multiple layers of AI technology to look at not only the face itself but also the context around deepfake ads.

As we have deployed this, we've seen immediate adversarial adaptation. We started with the topmost global celebrities, and immediately we saw country-level celebrities, government celebrities and government figures. As we enforced further down the chain, we saw scammers go local. This is useful, because it drives a lot of effort on their part. It takes some effort on our part, but we're happy to do that.

This adaptation and adversariness is something we must expect from scammers, and only by truly undermining the entire economy of scams will we be able to change that.

[Gabriel Ste-Marie, Bloc, Joliette—Manawan, QC]

It is horrible, you're right, but it's happening on your platforms. I know you're making an effort, but scams are still happening on your platforms.

How much responsibility do you bear for these thefts?

[Jon Camfield]

I would say there's incredible value in discussing across and working together across the entire fraud attack chain. Things that start on SMS or social media metastasize and move. They go onto websites—fake, fraudulent investment sites—but even after we block them, we see them stay on the open Internet for up to three years, meaning they're also being used in other campaigns, other tools and other practices on different platforms.

It truly is only through a whole-of-society response that we can share and take down how to deal with this.

[Rachel Curran, Director, Public Policy, Meta Canada, Meta Platforms Inc.]

I'll add to that, if you don't mind, Jon.

We have reduced the number of scams that are reported by over 50%, so our efforts have had a real impact in reducing the number of scams that are reported and scams that appear on our platforms. The efforts we're undertaking with Jon and his team are having a real impact. Have we reduced them to zero? Not yet, but we're making good progress towards that.

[Gabriel Ste-Marie, Bloc, Joliette—Manawan, QC]

Thank you for your answer.

Obviously, you need to keep doing more. I'm worried, because there are a lot of scams, and while some are happening on websites, it seems that many, if not most, of them are happening on your platforms. You have the power to fix that.

I have another point to make. For the past several years, Facebook users have been banned from seeing news content or sharing news articles or videos.

However, there are deepfakes with fake reports from Radio-Canada, TVA and other media outlets.

Is Meta planning to bring back news sharing in the near future, or is your model really just based on spreading disinformation to the public?

[Rachel Curran]

Yes, we would love to bring back Canadian news content onto our platforms, and I'm saying that as a Canadian, not as an official representative of Meta. We've said this before.

In terms of where scams are happening, look, we are here to talk to the efforts we are taking to reduce scams. I understand a number of our colleagues, other tech platforms, have been invited and have declined to appear before this committee to talk about the work they're doing to reduce scams. We think this is important enough that we want to talk to you about the efforts we are taking.

[Gabriel Ste-Marie, Bloc, Joliette—Manawan, QC]

I have one last question.

Why is Meta more successful at stopping news content from being shared than stopping deepfake videos from being used to scam the public?

Why are you more successful at taking down news content than fraudulent videos?

[Rachel Curran]

I don't think that's correct. The Online News Act says that either we need to compensate news publishers for the material they place voluntarily on our platforms, or we need to remove news content from our platforms entirely. We have chosen to comply with the Online News Act by removing news content from our platforms. Unfortunately, that's the situation we are in today.

We have spoken to the minister of heritage about options to restore news to our platforms. I'm hopeful we can get there at some point, but we're not there yet.

[Gabriel Ste-Marie, Bloc, Joliette—Manawan, QC]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ben Carr]

Thank you, Mr. Ste‑Marie.

Mr. Falk, the floor is yours, sir, for five minutes.

[Ted Falk, Conservative, Provencher, MB]

Thank you.

Mr. Shipley, I'd like to begin with you.

You said that two-thirds of scams—online scams and fraud—are on the Meta platform. What are the other platforms that fraudsters are using?

[David Shipley]

The precise sourcing for that was the Lloyds Banking Group in the U.K. On the weekend, The Independent said that two-thirds of their consumer fraud cases start on Meta-owned platforms. We also see in the literature other platforms on the social media side, and downstream, it's telecommunications, SMS text, fake phone calls, etc., on that side.

This has been consistent. In 2023, Lloyds reported that over 54% of APP fraud—authorized push payment—was happening on Meta-owned platforms. They own the market by dint of their size, so of course the scammers want to go there.

[Ted Falk, Conservative, Provencher, MB]

Would you propose any solutions?

[David Shipley]

Well, I would say this. If you—

[Ted Falk, Conservative, Provencher, MB]

Give me some low-hanging fruit, some easy wins.

[David Shipley]

Make Meta liable for the hundreds of thousands of dollars in fraud lost by Canadian seniors—a member mentioned the individuals in Quebec—until such time as the fraud ads stop. When they're properly financially motivated, they'll be able to make their billions in ads, but they won't be victimizing Canadians.

[Ted Falk, Conservative, Provencher, MB]

Mr. Camfield, I'd like to ask you a few questions as well.

It's clearly been identified that Meta is a medium for lots of online scamming. Based on the Reuters article, it would appear that Meta is well aware that it's being used as a conduit for scammers. What level of responsibility do you think Meta should take, and what are they taking?

[Jon Camfield]

We know we have a critical role to play in combatting scams. We are at the upper level of that funnel as described, or in the fraud attack chain, where a lot of fraudsters will seek out potential victims. To our credit or our downfall, we are one of the larger social media platforms, so we are an attractive target, as has been said.

That size comes with a responsibility and many challenges. We must balance free expression and the interests of small business alongside combatting scammers as hard as we can. We have to find ways to differentiate the bad actors and scammers, who will do their best to get around our defences, while making sure that normal users can access and use the platform successfully.