A new report by Seattle-based Hiya has found that Canadians are being targeted more aggressively by fraud calls than Americans. The report, released on Tuesday, found that 6.3% of unwanted calls received by Canadians in the first three months of the year were considered fraud, compared to 5.9% in the final quarter of 2022. The average Canadian received three spam calls per month, compared with 14.5 in the United States, but Canadians were on the receiving end of a much higher proportion of fraud-related calls. Spam calls accounted for 18.3% of calls from unrecognized numbers in Canada, with 6.3% considered fraud, while fraud calls accounted for just 0.7% of calls from non-contacts in the US.
According to the report, some of the top scams in Canada were related to cryptocurrency trading and those targeting newer immigrants who may be less familiar with the way the government works. The latter included callers impersonating government officials claiming to be from the Canada Border Services Agency or Canada Revenue Agency. Canadians also received high volumes of air duct cleaning scam calls, which the report noted were nothing new, but are largely unheard of outside of the country. The Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre received 90,377 fraud reports in 2022, totalling more than $530 million in losses.
The report suggests that “for those who are trying to hit the Canadian market, they’re doing so more aggressively”. Hiya recommends having some level of spam protection on your phone so that when the phone rings, recipients have something more than a 10-digit number to go on to decide, “should I be wary”. Combating scams has been a priority for Canada’s telecommunications regulator in recent years. The federal regulator mandated that telecom companies implement technology to validate a caller’s identity, with Rogers Communications Inc. and Telus Communications Inc. rolling out additional tools to help filter out spam calls, while Bell Canada got the green light from the CRTC in 2021 to block all fraudulent calls transmitted over its network entirely.