Telecom companies are rolling out new measures today designed to reduce those
relentless, irritating phone calls by scammers, calls that sound a little bit
like this: Can you first of all stop crying and just get a pen and paper
well many of the calls as you are probably no doubt familiar purport
to be from government agencies such as Revenue Canada or Service Canada others
offer services such as duct cleaning the fraudsters usually demand some kind of
payment too often in threatening tones and it works phone scammers have cost
Canadians more than twenty-four million dollars this year
CBC senior technology reporter Thomas Daigle has been tracking the complaints
and the new measures that are effect in effect as of today badly John even today
tomorrow the next day you're still going to be getting those fake calls from
Revenue Canada Service Canada the police in some cases this is not going to stop
all scam calls but it's gonna target as very specific category of scam calls I
took a screenshot of a caller ID I got on a call last week this number included
a letter it started with v2o5 that is exactly the kind of fake caller
ID number that this new technology being rolled out now is going to block it
shouldn't even make it to your phone numbers with letters in them numbers
that are all zeros or numbers with more than 15 digits the problem of course
there's a problem I tried it out this morning it doesn't work perfectly yet
I used spoofing software that can be found online to try to place a call from
a number with more than 15 digits it showed up on the caller ID as only
having 15 digits so the numbers still the call still went through so it's not
really gonna make a difference in this case for the person receiving the call.
My next guest a cybersecurity expert and author of the Canadian cyber fraud
handbook. Ss there anything that the rest of us consumers can do in the meantime
as these various plans get sort of put in place that we can do to stop at least
some of these calls from waking us up or calling us during dinner?
Right well one of my best pieces of advice is to treat it like spam I think
a lot of us have been used to seeing spam in our inboxes over the past year
and we've seen that some of them are just obvious right if you don't
recognize who's writing or if you see broken characters in this in the subject
line or if anything suspicious about it rings a bell you can delete it right
away and therefore the equivalent would be just don't answer the phone in some
cases you will open a spam message just in case it might be from your bank and
then it becomes obvious because it looks like an urgent message that says your
bank account might be closing and so that kind of phishing messages we're
kind of used to that and we can easily hang up on them if we think along those
same lines again over the past decade we've heard all sorts and we know that
these robo calls and these scammers are calling and sometimes we pick up the
phone and there's a three-second delay after you say hello well it's usually
safe to hang up at that point so I agree with with Jeff from the Canadian
Anti-Fraud Centre who said just hang up in many cases I will let it simply go to
voicemail and pick it up five minutes later or at my convenience it can't be
that urgent that if I don't recognize a number I'm going to miss out on some
huge opportunity or in my case be deported as I've received calls to
threaten me with deportation and I said - where exactly and they said well
nevermind that we're going to deport you so treated like spam ignore it delete it
hang up on on these callers and whatever you do don't call them back if you
suspect that they might be fraudulent