Email spam and lack of consent top list for biggest spam complaints: report

Canadians are sending approximately 6,459 complaints per week to the Spam Reporting Centre (SRC), according to a report issued by the CRTC. On Wednesday the CRTC released its Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) “snapshot” report for the six month period ending on March 31. The weekly reporting figures were up from the previous six month period which reported approximately 5,939 complaints per week. From October to March, the reporting center received a total of 167,939 complaints. Only 4,069, or 2.42 per cent, of the complaints were submitted using the online form, while the remainder of complaints were sent by email at spam@fightspam.gc.ca, according to the report. “The CRTC encourages Canadians to use the SRC’s online form to provide as much information as possible about potential CASL violations. The information provided by Canadians is an essential part of the intelligence the SRC gathers on spam and electronic threats. Each report is valuable and helps us to enforce CASL,” the commission wrote in its report. According to the report, 65 per cent of the complaints (reported through the online form) identified email as the main medium in which individuals were receiving spam. SMS text message followed with 23 per cent. Of those who reported through the online form, 94 identified lack of consent as the main reason for issuing their complaint, followed by identification of sender and deceptive marketing practices at 39 and 33 per cent respectively. (The total does not add to 100 per cent since Canadians can select more than one category for a complaint.) Around 65 per cent of the messages reported to the SRC were related to affiliate marketing or legitimate businesses selling or promoting the sale of a good or service, according to the report. Dating, food, drug and health, online shopping, leisure and gambling, and technology were the top five categories of affiliate marketing messages, in that order. The top five categories of commercial messages reported to the SRC primarily related to news and media followed by online shopping, technology, financial, and business-to-business. November was identified as the month with the highest amount of complaints during the six month period. “The CRTC has enhanced the search and reporting functions built into the SRC case management system. This will foster more complex searches and allows the enforcement agencies to create a variety of reports to help provide analytical insight for identifying new trends, violations and investigations,” the commission wrote in its report. The commission also highlighted some of its biggest anti-spam achievements to date such as its investigation into the Dark Web Marketplace known as CanadianHQ. The investigation led the CRTC’s Chief Compliance and Enforcement Officer to issue administrative monetary penalties totalling $300,000 to four Canadians and resulted in the shutdown of CanadianHQ which, according to the commission, was “one of the largest dark web marketplaces of its kind in the world.” In the past six months the CRTC also reached an agreement with Gap Inc. (Gap) for allegedly violating CASL, with the latter agreeing to make a payment of $200,000. According to the commission, since CASL came into force in 2014, it has issued $1.1 million in administrative monetary penalties and $868,000 from negotiated undertakings. The CRTC has received approximately $500,000 more in fines than it did in the previous six month reporting period, in which it received $805,000 in administrative monetary penalties and $668,000 from negotiated undertakings. The SRC provides three agencies (the CRTC, Competition Bureau, and Office of the Privacy) with access to a central database which can be used for CASL investigative and enforcement purposes. – Reporting by Jenna Cocullo at jcocullo@thewirereport.ca and editing by Michael Lee-Murphy at mleemurphy@thewirereport.ca

Email spam and lack of consent top list for biggest spam complaints: report

Broadcast | May 11, 2022

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Email spam and lack of consent top list for biggest spam complaints: report

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