Spam robo calls from sources pretending to be government agencies are up in B.C.: new survey

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Vancouver -

They’ve been calling you for years, claiming you’re in legal trouble with the border services agency or the CRA. Sometimes the threats are jarring, sometimes they’re laughable. Usually you hang up right away, but occasionally it’s funny to listen to the entire recording.

Sometimes the recording is in English, other times it’s in a language you might not understand.

Spam robo calls are an ongoing issue for mobile phone users in B.C. and have increased in frequency over the past two years, according to a survey from Research Co. polling company.

A survey of B.C. residents shows that over the past two months 50 per cent of those with mobile phones have been targeted with calls from people pretending to represent a government agency. That’s an increase of 15 percentage points from when the polling company asked the same question about two years ago, in Sept. 2019.

Men reported receiving the phone calls more (52 per cent) than women, and those in the age range of 35 to 54 were most likely to be targeted (58 per cent.)

And the incidence of receiving a robo call in Cantonese or Mandarin has increased by 20 percentage points since 2019.

”Just over half of mobile phone users in British Columbia say they have received phone calls and/or phone messages where an individual speaks Cantonese or Mandarin in the past two months,” reads a statement from the polling company.

And, those living in Metro Vancouver were also more likely to report receiving a call in Cantonese or Mandarin, with 61 per cent reporting such calls.

The rise in robo calls stands in stark contrast to text messages asking about which political parties a person supports, which decreased by half since 2019.

“Only 18 per cent of mobile phone users in British Columbia received a text message asking if they support a specific party or policy from an individual they do not know in the past two months,” reads the Research Co. statement.

And, across the province, only 28 per cent of mobile phone users say they didn’t receive any of these types of messages in the past two months.

The survey results are based on an online study conducted from Dec. 21 to Dec. 23, 2021, among 800 adults in B.C. The data was statistically weighted according to Canadian census figures for age, gender and region. The margin of error, which measures sample variability, is +/- 3.5 percentage points, nineteen times out of twenty.