Good afternoon, everyone.
I'd like to thank the committee members for offering me this opportunity to speak today.
My name is Kevin Cosgrove. I'm a network technician, educator and digital safety advocate in Windsor-Essex County in Ontario. I've been working in the IT field for almost three decades, but I've shifted to working more with actual people, through contacts, throughout our community. I've been working with law enforcement on digital fraud and educating the public in that area.
I teach classes each semester with seniors specifically. As we know, seniors are a major target for online, digital and phone fraud. In the stats I receive way down at my end of things, almost 25% of the victims of fraud are seniors. Each year we spend time with local police and educate seniors on how to avoid fraud.
I know this committee has certainly focused on things at the higher levels—dealing with the telcos and other things at international levels—but I'm the guy down in the trenches having the little old lady coming to me, telling me she got scammed, needing that type of help, and asking who she should call.
My biggest frustration in working at a local level and being an educator specifically focused on these matters is that the information is already available and out there. The RCMP, especially, has a phenomenal amount of information. When I speak to people in my classes, however, no one's heard of it. It's not that the RCMP is not doing a good job or is not doing any outreach, but when I speak to people, they're unaware.
As the committee is aware, the RCMP has a fabulous publication known as The Little Black Book of Scams. It's a wonderful publication, and they've had it for quite a few years. After doing this for almost 20 years, I only know one person who saw a physical copy of it. That's definitely an issue with some of the programs we have; some of the education and outreach we're getting from the RCMP isn't necessarily getting down to every level.
Of course, there's also sometimes a disconnect when the RCMP is not the leading authority in a jurisdiction and relies more on local police to deal with that. They're doing their own jobs. Basically, each little area we're running into is trying to reinvent the wheel instead of having a unified response to some of this stuff.
A big focus I have, when I'm teaching seniors and putting stuff out in the community, is making it accessible. When I got into doing this almost 20 years ago, I noticed that the focus on details, definitions and such things is unwieldy for the average person picking up a pamphlet and trying to understand it. I'm not disparaging some of the information out there, but an 84-year-old woman does not care what the differences are among phishing, smishing, spear phishing or whale phishing. They don't care about those types of details. They need information to keep themselves safe without reading a PSA, a public service announcement pamphlet that goes in the wrong direction for educating the public.
I'm definitely ready for any questions you may have. I think I had a few questions for the RCMP when I was sitting back there. However, that's not my place.
Thank you very much for the opportunity.
There was some mention earlier about STIR/SHAKEN and what kind of progress has been made there. Even though I'm a civilian, I speak with criminal intelligence analysts at the CAFC and the financial crimes unit in Windsor. According to them, the types of calls that are specifically targeted by STIR/SHAKEN have diminished. People are no longer reporting receiving calls that say “Canada Revenue” on their phone. They may see that exact same phone call show up as a long-distance number, but in terms of a spoof call being displayed as law enforcement or Canada Revenue, that has definitely decreased, according to the information I've been given.