Fraudulent calls | “No miracle solution”, warns the president of the CRTC

Fraudulent calls using fake numbers, originating from the so-called US “Department of Justice” or the Canadian tax authorities, have not gone away despite orders and ultimatums from the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC).

Karim Benessaieh
The Press

And if the vast majority of Canadian suppliers have agreed to fight this scourge, a regulatory obligation since November 30, 2021, “many technical problems” have complicated their task, declared this Thursday Ian Scott, president of the CRTC, before the Standing Committee on Industry and Technology.

“There is no single solution — no magic bullet — that can end this scourge,” he admitted. This is why we have implemented a robust strategy that relies on a number of technical and regulatory solutions. »

The essence of the CRTC’s strategy is centered on the implementation of a standard called STIR/SHAKEN, an acronym for ” Secure Telephony Identity Revisited/Signature-based Handling of Asserted information using toKENs “. Simply put, “this technology allows service providers to verify if a caller’s identity is trustworthy,” Scott said, for voice calls using Internet Protocol. A first deadline to force Canadian suppliers to implement it was set for March 31, 2019, then postponed to September 2020, June 2021 and, finally, to November 30.

Not a panacea

Most Canadian providers, including major ones such as Bell, Rogers, Telus and Shaw, believe they have met this deadline. Thirty-one of them submitted their first report as required last May. These documents, very redacted in their version available to the public, do not really allow to evaluate the effectiveness of this initiative.

But we still find in more than half of these reports one of the reasons why the STIR/SHAKEN standard is not a panacea. This is only effective with calls using end-to-end internet protocol (IP). However, many fraudulent calls use several connections, some of which are not IP, what is called in technical jargon ” Time Difference Multiplexing “. The acronym TDM is mentioned in 16 of the progress reports filed last May.

“A TDM voice circuit [est] not considered suitable [à la norme STIR/SHAKEN], explains in particular in its report Quebecor, owner of Videotron. As of June 30, 2021, we have not yet upgraded our voice systems to STIR/SHAKEN standards. Consequently, we had no suitable voice circuit for authentication and for STIR/SHAKEN verification. »

Videotron claims to be “currently in the process of identifying meters and defining the methodology” to make its network compatible.

“A significant percentage of interconnections between providers is still on TDM, adds Telus in its report last May. As Telus continues to encourage its partners to migrate to IP interconnects, it will take some time to fully achieve this goal. »

In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the equivalent of the CRTC, has been asking the industry since 2020 to remedy this weakness. A first standard was approved in June 2021.

other weapons

According to CRTC Chairman Ian Scott, artificial intelligence is “a promising new weapon” in the fight against fraudulent calls. After a 15-month trial, Bell had obtained authorization in December 2021 to implement its AI-based technology. “To date, including the trial period, more than 1.5 billion calls have been successfully intercepted and blocked on the Bell network,” said Scott.

As for the national do not call list, established in 2008 and which allows Canadians to signify their refusal to receive certain unsolicited calls, it now has 14.6 million numbers, he said. This method, however, is of little use with IP calls where the originating number can be easily changed.

“The problem of fraudulent calls is not limited to Canada; it is a problem in most English-speaking countries, concluded the president of the CRTC before the committee. In the United States alone, an estimated 2,100 robocalls are sent to consumers every second. »