Industry committee  Good afternoon. My name is Randall Baran-Chong. I’m an entrepreneur from Toronto, hence why I wanted to articulate myself through a PowerPoint. I'm here to represent Canadian SIM-swap Victims United, a grassroots organization of victim advocates from across Canada and across al

Industry committee  Okay.

Industry committee  Thank you.

Industry committee  My apologies for that. In terms of what we think, from the Canadian perspective, first, there need to be changes to the regulations and something similar to what Australia has done with pre-porting authorization needs to be introduced. It's as simple as getting a text from the n

Industry committee  There's something called soft-token authentication. There are things like Google Authenticator or Authy or things like that, which are available for quite a few different types of apps and things that we use. A lot of social media offers it. But often it's a secondary offered for

Industry committee  Absolutely. I think first codifying that within the regulations is important, because what we've often seen the carriers do is to fall back on saying they're complying with the regulations. However, the decision was made back in 2005, and obviously the kind of threat environment

Industry committee  I think there at least needs to be recognition, especially for the customer-facing elements in terms of the protections that are introduced, that there should be more disclosure about that and participation of customers in that. I mentioned the issue with the texts that went thro

Industry committee  That's the soft-token authenticator I was alluding to earlier. It's like Google Authenticator. It generates a code on your phone and asks you to essentially replicate the number you're getting on your app and put it in. Instead of getting a text message, you're using that number.

Industry committee  I'll give you an example. There was recognition, I think, by the different law enforcement agencies that have been dealing with this that there needs to be more coordination. Even though maybe these criminals are working in teams that are close to each other, these victims span a

Industry committee  I was offered $100.

Industry committee  Yes, I think that speaks volumes.

Industry committee  Individuals are partly responsible as well in terms of their data, for example, what they put into things like the cloud. To some degree, I'm paying a top-bracket idiot tax for uploading almost everything. I actually wasn't even aware that all that stuff was being uploaded, becau

Industry committee  Absolutely. We're almost kindred spirits on that. I came across his letter when we were doing our look at the stakeholders who were interested in this. If we had given our feedback of some of the solutions we thought of—it was very similar to the Australian solution—and if this w

Industry committee  Other victims and I have offered our support to the telcos numerous times and have received nothing but silence so far. If it's an industry that is truly service-oriented and talks about how its best interest is in how to serve and protect us, it isn't involving us at all. So f

Industry committee  As Senator Wyden in the United States has identified, this is just waiting to be a national security risk, with the takeover of officials' accounts, for example.