Industry committee  Thank you. I don't have any specific numbers on SIM swapping. One thing that I've noticed at my centre is that the reporting is low on those instances, but it could also be directly related to identity fraud. If I link that to identity fraud, then obviously I have a significant increase over the past two or three years in terms of identity fraud reported.

Industry committee  Thank you, Mr. Lynam. There is no doubt that seniors are a population that fraudsters always seem to target. They are often seen as easy prey. If I look at our statistical data, the losses associated with seniors—in our case, it's those aged 60 and over—represent about 30% of the losses that are reported to us on an annual basis.

Industry committee  This one is difficult to draw a specific number to because, for the vast majority of scam operations, they will try to work over many different jurisdictions. The way criminals operate in that sphere is that they will operate from point A, likely targeting a victim in point B, and then move the money to point C.

Industry committee  Yes, we are. The number of reports that we received at the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre was up about 25% for the same period, for the first four months of the year. Obviously, in April, we had an uptick in extortion email campaigns, which really put the numbers up. In just April alone, we received about 5,000 more complaints on that.

Industry committee  I'm not sure if I properly understand the question, but every effort to educate one another will certainly contribute to better protecting ourselves. One initiative that we've started picking up from the U.K. is Tell2. If everyone tells two other people, in no time we would cover the country.

Industry committee  You're welcome.

Industry committee  We have frequent conference call meetings to discuss the issue. We've been in touch with our main partners pretty much on a weekly basis to discuss current trends and how the situation has evolved. I can say that we've been in contact very often with our close partners.

Industry committee  Yes, there is. Those calls are mainly to discuss trends in intelligence that we can share with each other, but when there's something urgent or emerging we have protocols in place where we can share the information more rapidly. It's done within the same day or the day after when the information is what we call “hot”.

Industry committee  Unfortunately not, because it's a very difficult metric. You'd have to turn to Statistics Canada to have a better picture of what has been investigated, or where charges were laid, because of how it's being reported through the protocols in place or policies that police agencies across the country have to adhere to.

Industry committee  That's a very tough question to answer, because we always think that more could be done. There are always better things that we can do as law enforcement as well. Fraud is a collective problem. We need to be able to educate the public. We think public education is the key issue in being able to mitigate fraud.

Industry committee  Thank you, sir. As far as the method of solicitation goes, last year direct calls were the number one overall way Canadians were reached for frauds that were reported to us. It's reasonable to assume that most of those calls were spoofed. The challenge with spoofing a number is that it's not illegal in the sense that there are applications out there for people to do it just to play pranks on people.

Industry committee  Thank you, sir. Typically, once an attempt is made to reach out to a potential victim, the line has been crossed. It's virtually impossible to investigate every single case that comes in because of the massive amounts. As we explained earlier, we have many reports of fraud, but it's about being able to look at the totality.

Industry committee  No, not on the spoof numbers specifically. I have numbers on COVID-related fraud, which we starting saving since the beginning of March, and they say that the vast majority of the complaints we got were linked to text messages. Calls were third in terms of being reported.

Industry committee  I'm not sure if we know specifically at the Anti-Fraud Centre if a specific group of people in the population is being targeted. What we see is that fraud typically targets many people. Fraud doesn't have any discrimination. Everybody can be a potential victim at one point in time.

Industry committee  Of course, as was mentioned earlier by Assistant Commissioner Slinn in his elocution, scammers or fraudsters are always using opportunities to achieve their means. That's one thing they will do, and not just in using regular phone technologies, but also in abusing the IP technologies to commit their fraud and hide behind the technologies to actually avoid being detected.