Montreal tops for mobile phone spam
City’s name causing people to hang up
Mobile phone users in Montreal are far likelier to be targeted by spam messages than users in any other Canadian city, according to a study published Monday.
The study also found a spike in the number of unsolicited advertisements directed at Canadians on the eve of strict new anti-spamming legislation — which will come into effect on July 1.
Between last December and June, mobile phones with Montreal area codes received 34 per cent of the SMS spam in Canada. Vancouver was the next-highest city, garnishing 9 per cent of SMS spam followed by Quebec City, which received 5.5 per cent of SMS spam.
The spam was characterized by an aggressive campaign of automated messages offering cheap tickets to sporting events,
“In the worst cases, it was a ruse to get people’s credit card numbers.” CATHAL MCDAID
vacation deals and pornography among other things, according to AdaptiveMobile, the mobile security firm that authored the study.
It’s unclear why Montreal was so heavily targeted except that many of the offers were for local businesses.
“These were sophisticated, bilingual messages, for events or deals happening in Montreal,” said Cathal McDaid, head of data intelligence analytics at Adapt-iveMobile. “People who responded to the spam to buy tickets to an event sometimes found that the tickets had been obtained illegally or that they didn’t exist. In the worst cases, it was a ruse to get people’s credit card numbers and other personal information.”
Most spammers use a kind of two-pronged strategy: a robo-calling machine sends out the automated message and, if people chose to reply, they call into an office and speak to a sales representative.
“The automated messages do a lot of the legwork, but there’s still a human touch needed,” said Daniel Williams, a call supervisor at the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre. “It’s a huge problem. We can handle about 300 calls complaining about scams every day. But there’s way more people out there falling prey to aggressive marketing scams.”
Some robo-calling programs simply run through every sequential number in the 514 area code while others target numbers obtained online, often by illicit means. But despite Adaptibe-Mobile’s study, Williams says he hasn’t noticed more fraud complaints coming from Montreal than other regions in Canada.
“Montreal was a hot spot for a number of telephone scams, but we get calls from across Canada,” Williams said.
Canada’s anti-spam law, Bill C-28, will make it illegal for companies to send unsolicited electronic marketing communications. Bill C-28 covers email, phone calls, text messages and social media and mandates fines of up to $10 million for companies that violate the new law. Australia, the European Union and the United States have similar legislation in place.
McDaid says the new law may have caused the surge in SMS spam seen in Canada during the past six months.
“It could be a case of people trying to cash in before the law is in the books,” McDaid told The Gazette. “Or maybe they just don’t respect the law to begin with.”
Last year, AdaptiveMobile blocked 100 million SMS spam attempts in North America alone. Still, the company only intercepts a fraction of one per cent of the spam.
“These aren’t just a few kids working out of an attic,” McDaid said. “They’re rotating SIM cards to avoid detection, they’re customizing their sales pitch for specific areas.”
Montreal has long been a hub for dubious telemarketing firms, many of which have been shut down by police. But former telemarketers interviewed by The Gazette say that their sales calls rarely targeted Montreal.
“We called people in the American Midwest, Florida and targeted seniors offering them fraud protection they didn’t need for $100,” said one former telemarketer. “The places I worked at had varying degrees of sketchiness. You convinced yourself it was legal so you could sleep at night.”
The city, one telemarketer said, has a number of factors that make it an ideal place for potentially fraudulent businesses. It’s a major urban centre, in which office space is still relatively cheap and an abundant labour force of desperate students willing to ask few questions in return for a cash job.
In fact, the telemarketer said, Montreal earned such a bad reputation that his managers instructed employees to claim the company was U.S.based. Mentioning “Montreal” was a trigger for people to hang up, the person said.
“Once I showed up to work and the office was gone, there was nothing left of it, like it had never been there,” said another telemarketer. “They told us we were a legitimate business, but that was pretty much evidence to the contrary.”
It’s possible that the SMS spam is a kind of evolution of traditional telemarketing scams, Williams said.
“Whatever the case is, the rise of the Internet and electronic communications has given fraudsters more tools.”