By Denis Carmel
GATINEAU – On March 24th, Bell Canada filed an application with the CRTC to request permission to block so-called Wangiri fraud calls, until June 1.
Wangiri calls work the following way: one gets a phone call, most often on a cell phone and it rings only once. Wangiri is Japanese for “one ring”.
Then the victim is tempted to call back, thinking it missed a call. When it does, the “bad actor” will try to keep the victim on the phone for as long as possible and when the victim gets its telephone invoice, it will have incurred significant overseas long-distance charges. You telephone carrier will also incur interconnection charges.
This scam has been going on for some time in a fashion or another (i.e. modem high-jacking, back in 2005) from countries such as Sao Tome and Principe, Nauru or Cook Island.
The latest occurrence triggered a warning by the FCC, back in May 2019.
Back in July, BCE filed an application to use AI to block fraudulent calls for a trial period of 90 days. The present application is using the same technology and is suitable to block the Wanrigi fraud calls and it requests the permission to do so until June 1, 2020.
“We can confirm that there have been a number of alarming developments with adverse impacts on our networks,” reads Bell’s application.
“Bad actors make huge volumes of such calls in the hopes that a sufficient number of Canadian recipients will call them back. Because of the extraordinary strain being placed on our networks starting last week with the COVID-19 pandemic, we tracked the number of daily Wangiri fraud call incidents recorded on our network,” reads the Bell application they go on. Since the start of the pandemic since the application was sent, Bell says the number of suspected Wangiri fraud calls is 6,013,894.
They do not indicate if that number is higher than usual.
In an intervention, PIAC fully supports Bell’s application. “PIAC’s experience with consumer complaints with this scam, and the earlier issue of ‘modem highjackin’ fraud, PIAC believes that any consumer harm in false-positive blocked international calls (if any, which, based on the materials, would be possibly only a very few) likely would be massively outweighed by the consumer benefit in avoiding fraud in a time of consumer stress when the public is vulnerable and also due to the very likely benefit to consumers in the form of reduced network congestion on the voice telephony system, upon which Canadians rely as a true lifeline when many if not all are attempting social isolation or are in quarantine.”
This issue of false-positives, where non-fraudulent calls could be blocked, has the Internet Society and Marc Nanni opposing the application, especially when Bell carries calls of other Canadian carriers.
Rogers also strongly supports the application stating “During the Covid-19 crisis, we are observing high network traffic levels which leads to network congestion and blocking of legitimate calls. For example, when placing a call, the call originator may encounter network congestion and hear a ‘fast busy’ signal instead of correct call completion.”
Rogers also requests the same powers to block these calls.
Bell’s reply is due on April 27th.
