Thank you.
Madam Chair and honourable members of the committee, my name is Jérôme Birot, and I am the vice-president of development operations for telephone and value-added services at TELUS.
I'd like to begin by thanking you for the opportunity to address the committee today on the important topic of fraudulent telephone calls. With me for this discussion is John MacKenzie, TELUS's director of regulatory affairs.
As part of our first promise to customers, Telus has been devoting significant resources over the last few years toward finding a solution to the issue of fraudulent calls. However, it's not an easy issue to solve.
Companies around the world are struggling to find a solution. Global telecommunication networks have evolved to seamlessly connect people and data wherever they may be in the world. With the emergence of a truly global economy, these networks are being exploited by thieves and criminals at home and abroad intent on defrauding Canadians through fake and fraudulent phone calls.
I am often asked, “Why can't you just stop calls from the scam artists?” Unfortunately, fraudsters use sophisticated methods to mask the origin of their calls. They are extremely effective at blending their fraud calls with normal, legitimate network traffic as it is routed around the world. By the time they reach our shores, it is very difficult to distinguish between a fraudulent call and a legitimate call.
Since we have a regulatory obligation to allow legitimate calls to either terminate on our network or transit through it, the calls are routed to their intended destinations. When we are able to identify fraudsters, we do our best to block their calls. These are often static methods, and are not effective in a dynamic environment. So what can we do?
There are third party apps and capabilities provided by smart phone manufacturers, allowing users to block or filter their calls. They can prove cumbersome for consumers to use or may not be very effective. In addition, there are several types of systems that telecoms use to limit fraud calling in the network, such as call blocking and call filtering.
Call blocking systems, such as universal call blocking, or UCB, involves the telecommunications service provider blocking suspicious calls originating or terminating on its network, or passing through its network. For example, a calling number with all zeros would be blocked. On the other hand, call filtering systems are controlled by customers. They filter calls based on their preferences, and do not affect calls to anyone else.
At Telus, we offer a call control service, a proprietary call filtering system provided free of charge to most of our home phone customers. Call control is designed to be simple for our customers to activate and simple for them to use.
To explain how it works, I will use the hypothetical example of me trying to call you, Madam Chair. You will be a Telus customer. You will have activated call control on your phone. When I call your phone number, my call will be intercepted by the network before it reaches you. I will then hear the following message: “This number is call controlled. To get through, please press...”. Then it will prompt the caller, me, for a random number between zero and nine. We call this the challenge. I then have to press the correct number. When I do that, my call to you will be connected and your phone will ring. If I press the wrong number or do not press any number at all, my call will be rejected. I'll hear a voice recording indicating that you are not receiving calls. More importantly, your phone will not ring.
It's proven very effective at filtering out fraudulent calls, because those calls are typically autodialed by a computer system, and computer systems lack the ability to follow the instructions from the challenge.
Call control can also be customized through the use of personal lists, such as accepted callers and blocked callers. If a phone number is on the customer's accepted callers list, it will bypass the challenge. If, on the other hand, a phone number is on the customer's blocked callers list, it will be rejected.
We also have another list unique to each customer called the recent callers list. The recent callers list, which is controlled by Telus, comprises the last 10 phone numbers that have successfully passed the challenge. Phone calls from these numbers do not get challenged until they are overwritten by more recent calls.
In my previous example, this will mean, Madam Chair, that your friends and family who call you often would not have to pass the challenge every time they call you.
The results of call control have been impressive. Since its initial introduction in May 2018, we have determined that call control is significantly more effective than UCB, blocking 40% of incoming calls to customers who have activated the feature. Call control is also almost immune to spoofing, namely, where fraudsters hide their identity by faking a genuine number, like the one here today or one from a local area code. Due to the success of call control, we have been working on enabling it for our wireless customers. We expect to make it available to them in the coming weeks.
Switching gears, I would like to conclude by talking about STIR/SHAKEN. STIR/SHAKEN is neither a blocking system nor a filtering system. It is a set of protocols designed to validate the integrity of the caller ID and to provide the customer receiving a call with the assurance that the calling number belongs to the caller. Voice service providers who fail to support STIR/SHAKEN will likely find themselves at a competitive disadvantage. It is clear that STIR/SHAKEN has momentum in North America, and I expect it will be adopted shortly thereafter in Canada.
Telus is among the Canadian service providers that established a new corporation, the Canadian Secure Token Governance Authority, to support the implementation and operation of STIR/SHAKEN in Canada. However, there are still many issues that prevent STIR/SHAKEN from fully addressing the problem of fraudulent calls. The most significant of these issues is that STIR/SHAKEN standards will apply to calls within Canada initially, and at best within North America. However, many fraudulent calls originate from outside Canada. Another issue is that the system does not work if there is legacy circuit-switched equipment anywhere in the call path, which is common across networks that have been in operation for decades. Finally, we do not know how smart phone manufacturers will embrace STIR/SHAKEN standards or display STIR/SHAKEN information on their devices.
As a result of these challenges, and until STIR/SHAKEN standards are adopted globally, we do not know when STIR/SHAKEN will meet the high expectations that many have for the technology. Notwithstanding these issues, Telus is supportive of STIR/SHAKEN. We're confident that its capability will continue to improve. While we likely cannot offer STIR/SHAKEN sooner than in the U.S., we expect that Canada will follow shortly thereafter. In the meantime, we're confident that call control will provide effective protection for Telus customers.
That concludes my opening remarks. I welcome any questions you may have.