I guess it's because it's equally personal, since I'm a victim myself. Since then, I have been able to hear the recording from the police of the customer service representative who impersonated a Rogers employee, called the Rogers store, and essentially got my information. It was surrendered very easily. The scammer essentially impersonated this employee and was able to provide a customer number and all the other stuff. I think it speaks to a broader problem within the telcos and the ability to socially engineer and exploit these folks.
I think part of the problem is that if you think of an incentive, I can tell you an outcome. The problem is that these customer service reps—and I have sympathy for them—are not very highly paid and they are not very highly trained. A lot of their metrics are based upon how many customers they can get through during their shifts. What's the satisfaction of that? Their incentives are more to.... If someone wants to try to port their number, let them do it. They don't want to put up resistance. They don't want to challenge whether this is the right person or things like that. If the incentives continue to essentially enable them to focus more on throughput, business outcomes and things like that, versus protecting customers' privacy and information, then I think this problem will persist.
The second thing in terms of awareness is that there is, of course, the broader awareness of good hygiene. Let's move away from SMS-based 2FA. This is something that the Federal Communications Commission in the United States has been promoting, as they consider SMS-based 2FA and SIM swapping a national security threat, but there's also the corporate awareness. For example, when Rogers introduced its text notification form in its first failed attempt at 2FA, customers thought the text notifications were frauds. They thought they were spam as well, but it's because of Rogers' practices being so obscure and their not sharing these practices that customers weren't aware that this was trying to protect them.
There are many different opportunities, and a lot of them emanate from the telcos themselves.