Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to our witnesses for appearing.
It seems to me that this is a very similar problem to the one we have with all of these illegal phone calls purporting to come from CRA. Over the last number of years, tens of thousands of Canadians have been harassed by these calls. Over $10 million has been stolen from Canadians because of this, and there are really two ways to go about shutting this activity down. One is to block the phone numbers; the alternative is to shut down these call centres.
I don't think blocking the phone numbers is a realistic way of going about it, because anybody can get a burner cellphone and get a new phone number pretty quickly to restart the scam. Thus, shutting down these call centres is pretty important. Many of them are outside of the country, in places such as Mumbai, India. I think that's the solution to it.
Similarly, when we're looking at illegal set-top boxes or illegal streaming services, we can try to ban the sale of these illegal set-top boxes, but I don't think that's realistic. There's new technology, new hardware, new software coming along all the time. Open platforms such as Android allow people to produce these programs. I don't think that's the solution. Really, to me, it seems that the solution is to shut down the servers that are hosting this illegal streaming of content.
My first question is, where are most of these servers located, in Canada or outside of Canada?
I'll direct my questions to BCE.