Since the start of the year, we have processed over 1,360 files. This is between 20 and 30% continuous increase since the creation of the cyberinvestigations module. We really deal with all crimes in the Criminal Code, but I would tell you that what will attract our attention a lot are crimes involving threats to victims. Crimes against the person are on the rise and it is certain that we do not have all the figures, not everything happens to us.
Threats of all kinds. Online threats made on platforms. Files of robbery, armed robbery where we find ourselves selling on Marketplace or Kijiji, where we find ourselves having our money or the product stolen by the person we met online.
People are using the internet a lot to afford much more than they would normally afford, there really is no holding back. We have this feeling that we are anonymous, which is not often the case. There are a lot of ways to locate people, but it seems like people don’t realize this and take a lot more action online.
I understand that it is very difficult. There are victims who will not feel listened to, they will return home telling themselves that they were sent away without having done anything. I hear it often. On the other hand, we really have to look at the other side of the coin and take into account the facts before us. Stalking is a very difficult crime to prove.
Often I’ll tell them, “We’re going to start from scratch. I believe you, I understand your story, I understand how difficult it is. » But to find someone online, I need the identifiers of these fake accounts they used, screenshots of what they send you in messages, I need the dates and times when he wrote to you to prove repetition and persistence. Often I will send them back to the work table.
I would tell you that we are equipped and we put a lot of effort into it. It’s really an amalgamation of techniques or interventions. But at the virtual level, we still have a very high success rate and we find a lot of people who believe they are anonymous.
We will guide the company to explain what we need. These are very complex investigations and if a municipal police force like the SPVM does not have the capacity or technological resources, we will work with the Sûreté du Québec (SQ) or the RCMP Cybercrime Center. Companies, on the other hand, will often have the priority of resuming their activities and will call on specialized firms.
In my experience with my team, with the numbers I see, most choose not to file criminal charges. We will always encourage them to do so. We will ask them not to pay their ransom, because there is a risk of recurrence and no guarantee that their system will be unblocked.
I don’t want to say that we don’t do prevention, but my team specializes in intervention. Our primary objective is to solve investigations and assist in the investigation of virtual crimes. There is no awareness campaign that will come from the cyber investigation.
On the other hand, we share a lot of expertise and information, which we will give to front-line police officers to popularize the phenomenon, explain it and see how we can help the victim. For example, how will a police officer handle a sextortion or ransomware complaint? What does a victim need to give us in their online stalking report?
We travel a lot to conferences to talk about issues in terms of cyber investigation and cybercrime, to make them known in 2023. If, for example, educators or parents do not know that Snapchat exists, how TikTok works, that Omegle is one of the most popular applications among high school students.
Maintain parental controls. At 6 years old, 7 years old now, they end up on platforms where you’re supposed to be 13, and these are not isolated cases. My first suicide attempt victim due to threats on social media was 6 years old, in first grade. For me, this is very disturbing. People need to know it, we need to talk about it.
I think it will continue to grow constantly, I don’t think it will decrease. It will become more complex, it will multiply. That’s why we’re organizing the Montreal Cybersummit [which takes place this Tuesday and Wednesday]. There will be more than 300 investigators from all organizations who will be gathered for two days, with training where we will address the virtual world, the metaverse, cryptocurrency, these new technologies like ChatGPT. Everything is becoming more complex, we now have the virtual world and the real world where we lead two lives in parallel.
We can no longer close our eyes. Will it go down? No. The only way to deal with it, not to get discouraged and not to give up, is precisely to work together, to never work in silos again, to do continuing education, to continue reading, to appropriate this technology.
