Here’s why you’re still getting so many annoying scam phone calls — and four recent developments to stop them

The calls seem innocent enough - the numbers often pop up with a local area code and appear similar to your own - yet the fraudsters on the other end are anything but.

They impersonate Canada Revenue Agency officers, bank investigators, your telecom provider, Amazon - and of course they offer to clean your air ducts. They use robocalling technology and spoofed" telephone numbers that make it appear as though the call is coming from nearby, and they tend to go after victims from certain ethnic communities, recent immigrants, teenagers and very often seniors.

There are no definitive numbers on how many scam calls people receive every year and the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre estimates people only report five to 10 per cent of fraud. But out of more than 90,000 reports of fraud last year, 21,000 originated through a telephone call, making phone calls the most common first point of contact for fraudsters.

Those calls led to a total of almost $57 million in losses in 2022, more than double the amount lost to scams stemming from direct calls in 2017. And the CRTC told the Star it continues to receive upwards of 300,000 complaints about spam calls per year.

At a parliamentary hearing on fraudulent calls last fall, the second held in as many years by the federal industry committee, Brian Masse asked the question on many people's minds: When it comes to fraudulent and annoying calls, just what will it take to stop Canadians' phones from ringing?

Can you come up with a plan so that we, as legislators, can look at that and then see what potential results we can get?" the long-serving NDP MP from Windsor West said to Ian Scott, chair of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission at the time.

What I'm looking for is easy steps we can take right away to deal with this."

Part of the answer to Masse's question is surprising: We've actually made some largely invisible yet encouraging progress in recent years. Things are bad, but they could be a lot worse.

Those calls you used to get from numbers that don't look anything like phone numbers - that would appear on your call display as a long string of random digits - have been stopped and one phone company's use of an innovative technology has blocked close to two billion fraud calls.

On top of that, if you haven't already, you'll probably start seeing occasional notifications on your mobile phone when an incoming call is likely spam."

Yet, there's still a big hurdle to a plan to tackle spoofing, and outsmarting nimble cybercriminals and fraudsters won't come easy.

Fraud is still thought of as kind of a soft crime, and it's not," Masse said in an interview, adding that as an MP he has received a deluge of complaints on the topic. I've seen first-hand how badly fraud has affected people, not only financially but psychologically and socially."

A fix for broken caller ID?

Pamela Caudle's sisters have committed her landline number to memory and she's reluctant to give it up, but she and her husband, Ken, say the constant scam calls they receive have them ready to unplug the phone.

They call late at night," said Ken, adding with a chuckle, 9 p.m. is late for us." The couple, who are in their 70s and have lived in the same Brampton home with the same telephone number for close to 40 years, say they get about 10 calls a week, plus more on their cellphones.

If the call display had the name and location of the person calling, boy that would help so much," he said. I can't believe that (the telecom companies) can't do that. Why can't they?"

Since November 2021, Canada's phone service providers have been required to deploy a new technology meant to address caller ID spoofing, the problem at the heart of Ken Caudle's complaint.

Since spoofed calls appear to be coming from real numbers and don't look any different from legitimate calls, they can't just be blocked outright, said Steven Harroun.

Harroun, who is the chief compliance and enforcement officer at the CRTC (I like to say I'm responsible for all the things Canadians like to complain about," he told the Star), said the new tech doesn't block spoofed calls, but it can help warn users to be suspicious.

It's called STIR/SHAKEN (an acronym that stands for - wait for it - Secure Telephony Identity Revisited/Signature-based Handling of Asserted information using toKENs), and it uses digital certificate technology to verify that the calling number is accurate and has not been spoofed.

But it only works when calls are both placed and received on internet-protocol-based systems, which the vast majority of phone networks in Canada are not, Harroun said. Users' smartphones must also be designed to work with the protocol, which not all models are.

It's slow adoption in Canada. I think about 10 per cent of the network is VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol). We've still got 90 per cent of the (telephone) lines in the ground," he said. Phone companies are upgrading their networks to IP, but that will take time and there is no set deadline for it.

(STIR/SHAKEN) is a verification system at the end of the day," said Harroun, explaining that, when the system does work, within nanoseconds" it can identify whether the call is from a legitimate number or not and, if it isn't, display a notification indicating the call is likely spam.

I can't stop the phone from ringing under this particular protocol. The call is still going to go through, but at least there is a flag there as you look at your call display and decide whether or not you want to answer."

Billions of calls blocked

That warning system for spoofed calls is just one piece of a larger puzzle for Harroun.

In 2019, the CRTC directed phone companies to block all calls from malformed numbers," such as 1234567890 or a long string of zeros.

Those used to be common, Harroun said, estimating that many people would receive about one per week, which added up to about 700 million calls per year.

Now, while the CRTC still gets about 6,000 complaints about spam calls per week, he said, the gripes about calls from those malformed numbers have stopped.

The CRTC also receives about 900 complaints every week about telemarketing calls. Some of those, while annoying, are placed legitimately by politicians or companies with which consumers have an existing relationship. (To cut down on those calls, Harroun urges people to add their name to Canada's Do Not Call List, which telemarketers are obliged to purchase and comply with or face fines, though this system does not always work smoothly either.)

On outright fraud calls, Harroun cites an initiative by Bell as one success story. In 2020, the CRTC authorized the telecom company to launch a trial to identify and block scam calls using a proprietary artificial intelligence (AI) technology.

Bell blocked almost 150 million calls during an initial 90-day period and the CRTC has since granted the company permission to use the tech on a permanent basis. Bell says it has blocked almost two billion calls since launching the trial.

It's something certainly that we've talked about internally like, I wish some of the other big carriers would do this,' " said Harroun of Bell's AI technology.

For their part, Rogers and Telus, Canada's two other major wireless and home phone providers, say they, too, have voluntarily introduced call-filtering tools that didn't require CRTC authorization. (None of the three companies agreed to interviews for this story.)

While consumers can also use third-party apps on their smartphones to filter spam, Rogers is in the midst of rolling out a new feature that detects and flags likely spam calls. And Telus launched a feature in 2020 that requires unknown callers to listen to a brief message and manually respond with a one-digit code before being connected. The company said this blocks the majority of auto-dialled calls.

Calls for action

Still, Masse, who brought the motions that triggered both committee hearings on fraud calls, believes the industry and the CRTC could have done more to address these problems sooner. He's sharply critical of the regulator for permitting multiple delays of the initial industry-wide launch of the STIR/SHAKEN technology.

Ian Scott (the former chair) just gave into the delays with no repercussions. It was just ridiculous," Masse said.

But he added that there is a new chair now (Vicky Eatrides took over in January) and he believes staff at the commission have become more active on the file and have started gathering and sharing better information. We have a new CRTC chair and I see some change happening."

He'd like the CRTC to set expectations around fraud calls and require the industry to produce annual reports. (Telecom companies do report on the progress of STIR/SHAKEN in their networks but many portions are blocked out for confidentiality reasons and the documents are highly technical.)

Masse also wants to see more engagement on the topic from his fellow lawmakers. For example, the CRTC has repeatedly asked for a legislative change that would allow it to share more information about specific scams with other government agencies such as the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre and law enforcement, but nothing has been done to make that happen.

In the meantime, he said, raising awareness is all he can do.

Until we get a general business and government response that's more mature, taking to the grassroots on this is the way to go."

Preying on our crocodile brains"

Kevin Cosgrove welcomes call filtering and other means of stopping the calls at their source, but the digital safety educator says that as scammers quickly change their tactics in response, none of it is enough if you don't know how to protect yourself.

There's no technology that's going to slap the phone out of your hand," said Cosgrove, who is based in Windsor and has worked with Masse on fraud prevention.

Fraudsters are quick to exploit issues in the news, Cosgrove said, with opportunistic texts or calls about government pandemic support payments or refunds in the wake of the Rogers network outage.

Cybercriminals or fraudsters really leverage what I call the crocodile part of the brain - your reactive part, before you've had time to really think about what's going on - they'll stress an urgency or emotional aspect," said Chris Lynam, director general of the National Cybercrime Coordination Unit of the RCMP, which works with the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre and launched less than a month into the pandemic.

That's especially true of the grandparent scam," he said, in which scammers expertly play on people's emotions by targeting someone, often a senior citizen, and then impersonating a loved one calling to say they have been arrested and urgently need cash to post bail.

Such calls are becoming even more sinister with the advent of generative AI technology, which can create startlingly accurate phoney versions of someone's voice (known as deep fakes") based on just a short clip of them speaking, often grabbed from a social media post.

Rijul Gupta is CEO of DeepMedia, a California-based company that allows people to use its AI tools for language translation purposes. (From the data sets created by that user base, the company then develops deep-fake detection technology that it licenses to corporations and governments to help those organizations detect the fakes.)

These scams are about to get significantly more advanced with the creation of generative AI," Gupta said. Even tech-aware consumers can't tell that it's fake - it's really scary."

Lynam said taking a few minutes to think before responding to an unusual request for money or information is important. He also urges people to speak to the seniors in their lives to let them know they won't call out of the blue to ask for money.

It is a little bit of an arms race," he said, adding that cybercriminals are among the most innovative and adaptive people on the planet."

For the CRTC's Harroun, who was sitting at Scott's side during those committee hearings, there's no magic answer but only slow and steady progress to reduce the number of fraud and nuisance calls Canadians receive.

At the end of the day, I've been very honest and sat in front of parliamentarians and said, I will never stop all the calls. I will never stop all the spam. It's likely impossible.' "

Christine Dobby is a Toronto-based business reporter for the Star. Reach her at cdobby@thestar.ca