CRTC reports fewer spam complaints in bi-annual report

Canadians have been sending slightly fewer complaints per week to the Spam Reporting Centre (SRC), according to a bi-annual report issued by the CRTC. Thursday, the CRTC released its Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) “snapshot” for the six-month period ending Sept. 31. The last report, which studied the six month period ending March 31, found that Canadians were sending the SRC 6,459 complaints per week. This time around the CRTC recorded 6,119 complaints per week. From April to September, the reporting center received a total of 159,101 complaints, which is 8,000 less than what was previously reported. The CRTC encourages the use of its online form for reporting complaints and saw a slight uptick (3.2 per cent compared to 2.4 per cent) in the number of complaints being submitted that way. The remainder of the complaints were sent by email to 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,” the commission wrote in its report. According to the report, 57 per cent of the complaints reported through the online form identified email as the main medium in which individuals were receiving spam – compared to 67 per cent during the previous six month period. SMS text messages jumped from 23 per cent to 32 per cent of complaints. Of those who reported through the online form, 47 per cent identified lack of consent as the main reason for issuing their complaint, followed by identification of the sender and deceptive marketing practices at 21 and 19 per cent, respectively. Complaints in each of those categories were at its highest in August and almost double that compared to some of the months during the previous reporting period, the report stated. The top five categories of commercial and marketing messages reported to the SRC relate to: online shopping; business-to-business; food, drugs and health; home, auto and real-estate; and software and technology.

CRTC reports fewer spam complaints in bi-annual report

Brief | November 17, 2022

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CRTC reports fewer spam complaints in bi-annual report

Brief | November 17, 2022

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