Canadian Organized Crime Vs Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation

This is actually an older post from 2014 which was published on a different source. A source that is no more, as the website it was published on has been deleted.

I am therefore reposting it here.

Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation

Did you know that amongst the many activities run by organized crime, one of them is running spam and scam operations?

That means if you get spam from a local source and it looks fishy then it probably is the mafia that is running the scam. eg. If you receive a fake email from the Bank of Montreal asking you to login in to your Bank of Montreal account via a third party website, that website is probably owned directly or indirectly by a member of the Montreal Mafia.

In other words the Rizzuto family. Or people working for them.

Those scammy emails that are pretending to be from something else, often a bank or other financial institution, are what is known as “phishing attacks”. They are phishing for your private banking information in an effort to get into your bank account and then steal your money.

It is that simple. Fake website that looks like it belongs to a bank. Fake email pretending to be from the bank asking you to login. You go to the website, they record your data, within 5 minutes your bank account is cleaned out and all your money has been wired to an off-shore account.

Now there are a variety of other scams out there. You are probably already familiar with the cheque scams, the Nigerian Prince scams, the lottery winnings scams, and so forth.

They all have a different angle. Your bank information, your credit card info, possibly even after your passwords for different social media websites because sometimes people use the same passwords for their bank accounts.

Right: Canada Anti-Spam Legislation meeting in Toronto 2014

The good news however is that the Canadian government is now starting to fight back.

Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) will go into effect on July 1st 2014 and will result in 35 federal investigators going after Canada’s biggest spam offenders, toppling over the biggest spammers in Canada like dominoes and slapping the big offenders with fines of up to $10 million.

However when it comes to phishing attacks run by the Montreal Mafia I am worried CASL will come up short. After all, its the mafia. How are they going to catch a gang of thugs which have been running illegal operations for decades and rarely ever get caught by the police?

Case in point the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) years ago tried to collect on taxes owed by Vito Rizzuto, the godfather of the Montreal Mafia. Instead of receiving money CRA somehow mysteriously wrote the crime boss a cheque giving him more money – an incident which has since been reported by employees at CRA as highly suspicious as to how the crime boss managed to rob the Canada Revenue Agency of thousands of dollars.

Thus if the Canada Revenue Agency cannot catch these crooks, what makes the CRTC (the government regulator which will be in charge of enforcing CASL) think they can catch them?

Sheer gall?

I don’t think they will. I would LOVE it if these crooks were caught (and so would Canadian banks), but I don’t think it is going to happen.

Earlier this morning I went to a meeting in Toronto organized by Vigorate Digital to talk about the new anti-spam laws. Vigorate Digital does email marketing in Toronto and is therefore one of those squeaky clean companies which wants to go on being squeaky clean by upholding the new laws.

Right: I went to the meeting with my colleague Robert Campbell, who works in online marketing.

During the meeting I was handed the microphone and I asked several questions, basically whether political parties would be exempt from the new laws (which they unfortunately are, and I think they should not be because I feel they should still be forced to use an “opt in” / consent system), and I asked how would these new laws be enforced?

And the speaker explained how the CRTC will dedicate 35 federal investigators to finding the biggest spammers, going after them financially with fines of up to $10 million, and so forth.

Which to me means that the mafia run phishing operations will be unaffected because they can simply drop out of sight, use off shore bank accounts, refuse to pay the fines, and so forth.

The CRTC would need to prove an electronic paper trail going back to the mafia in order to actually catch them and convict them of breaking Canada’s spam laws – let alone convicting them of fraud, theft, etc.

And on the rare case, recover money defrauded from people’s bank accounts due to large scale spam operations.

Conclusions

I think CASL is a step in the right direction in cutting back on spam, phishing attacks, scams, and so forth – but I think the CRTC will want their investigators to be carrying firearms if they are going up against crooks like the Rizzuto family.