As I said in the opening comments, we pursue deceptive marketing and mass marketing fraud under the Competition Act. We've had criminal prosecutions for mass marketing fraud in the last several years that resulted in significant penalties, including jail for an individual named Terry Croteau.
We are also one of the three key partners in the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, located in North Bay, which does incredible work on a very small budget. If anyone is looking to provide it with additional funds, that would be great. The RCMP, the Competition Bureau and the Ontario Provincial Police run the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, which is primarily a call centre, taking in and gathering data on fraudulent scams and the scam of the moment, and trying to disrupt those scams.
The bureau also has a unit that is dedicated to disrupting mass marketing fraud—I won't get into all the details of how we do it—by using tools at our disposal and contacts that we have to try to disrupt frauds and scams that are getting under way.
What's interesting is that, unfortunately, the number you've probably heard is not even close to the actual number of dollars that Canadians are defrauded of every year. Of course, with the digital economy, it's becoming a bigger and bigger problem to police that type of behaviour, because it can originate anywhere and end up in a living room in Kelowna or Saskatoon, and be perpetrated by people on the other side of the world who are very difficult to track down. This is becoming a bigger and bigger problem that we have to pay more and more attention to.
I hope that provides you with an overview of the work we do in this area. We investigate and refer criminal cases to the Public Prosecution Service of Canada for this type of mass marketing fraud.