A man walked into a Telus store in Calgary to switch carriers and walked out with three accounts.
He didn’t know that. He paid the account number he was given. The payments landed on one record while the bills kept coming on another, so Telus sent missed-payment notices, then sent him to collections. His credit score took what he called “four black strikes,” and his bank told him the score disqualified him from a government business loan. Telus eventually waived the balance as goodwill and said he “may have accidentally entered an incorrect account number.” Global News ran the story in January 2024. He figured the company owed him about $36.
I keep that one because it’s small. No hacker, no ring, no deepfake. One person, one store visit, and a database that now had three versions of him. Everything that went wrong after that was the system doing exactly what it was built to do, to the wrong record.
That’s the thing about a duplicate account. It doesn’t sit there. It gets billed. It gets emailed. It gets reported.
What the twin record does to your marketing spend
Start with the cheap end, because it’s the end most teams don’t count.
Validity surveyed 602 people who run customer databases for a living and published the results in July 2025. Seventy-six percent said less than half the data in their system is accurate and complete. Thirty-seven percent said their company loses revenue directly because of it. Validity’s own audit of 264 billion records found 47 percent of contact email addresses were invalid or too risky to trust.
So a chunk of every campaign is going to a record that isn’t a person, or is the same person twice. That’s the waste you can see on the invoice. The waste you can’t see is the regulator.
Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation doesn’t care why you emailed someone who said no. On August 10, 2026, Indeed Canada agreed to pay $200,000 after the CRTC found it had sent messages to people who had withdrawn their consent. On October 1, Pizza Hut’s Canadian company agreed to $500,000 for sending without consent and for not acting on unsubscribe requests inside ten business days. Neither document says the word “duplicate.” I’d still bet that’s how a lot of this happens. The unsubscribe lands on one record. Its twin keeps getting the campaign.
And the twins are multiplying on purpose now. Arkose Labs’ threat report from December 2025 put fake account creation at 46 percent of all the fraudulent activity it saw, the single biggest attack type, with sign-up forms “the weakest link” across all nine industries it tracked. HUMAN Security’s 2026 benchmark counted the fake accounts it caught per customer: about 218,000 in 2023, about 1.48 million in 2025. Every one of those that gets through is a welcome offer paid out, a referral credit issued, a free month consumed, and a row that will skew your conversion numbers for a year.
What it does to the bill
Now the expensive end.
The Commission for Complaints for Telecom-television Services took 23,647 complaints in the year ending July 2025. That’s the most in its history, up 17 percent. Billing was 46 percent of every issue raised, the highest share in five years. The single biggest line item was “incorrect charge for monthly price plan,” at 6,001 issues. “Credit or refund not received” came next at 3,964. And the category that should worry you most, “third-party credit reporting,” was up 27 percent, because a wrong telecom record doesn’t stay in telecom. It walks over to Equifax.
The mid-year numbers that came out in April 2026 are worse. Complaints up 61 percent. Incorrect monthly charges up 66 percent.
I don’t think most of that is fraud. I think most of it is the Calgary story at scale: records that don’t match reality, feeding a billing engine that trusts them.
The banks prove the point with a regulator’s signature. The Financial Consumer Agency of Canada published four decisions against four of the big banks between November 2024 and June 2026. BMO had the wrong fee-waiver start date on 101,091 customer records from 2010 to 2024. Over 500 customers complained before anyone caught it. TD had a payment-frequency error on 160,658 loan accounts that ran, in the agency’s words, “for over 20 years.” RBC stranded credits on deactivated card accounts when it migrated them to new ones, 227,947 accounts, $22.4 million refunded. Not one of these was fraud. Every one was a field that was wrong and a statement that went out anyway.
The synthetic version is the same problem with better manners
A synthetic identity is a duplicate account that nobody’s looking for, because it belongs to nobody.
Equifax Canada’s 2026 white paper on synthetic identities says the share of fraudulent credit applications that were synthetic doubled between 2022 and 2024. It also describes how they’re built, and this part should land with anyone who runs a phone or utility company. The identity is nurtured for 18 to 24 months. It pays on time. It builds what Equifax calls “digital dust”: utility bills, rent, recurring subscriptions, device data. Your bill is the dust. Your on-time billing record is what makes the fake person look real to the next lender.
Then it busts out, and Equifax notes the loss is “often miscategorized as bad debt.” So it never even shows up as fraud in your numbers. It shows up as a customer who stopped paying, which your marketing team will then try to win back.
TransUnion’s October 2025 survey of Canadian business leaders put synthetic identity at 26 percent of fraud losses, up from 18 percent the year before, the biggest jump of any type. I’ll be fair about one thing: the same report has Canadian telecom’s suspected digital fraud rate at a low 0.2 percent and falling. The attempts don’t show up at your door. Your clean billing record is what they’re after.
Brazil, where the bill is the complaint
I work for a Brazilian company, so here’s the version with six years more data.
Serasa Experian blocked 2.86 million identity fraud attempts at account opening in the first half of 2026, up 32.9 percent. Telephony was 22.1 percent of them. More than one in five fake identities in Brazil was trying to get a phone account, and that’s in a country with a universal tax number and a national digital login.
And Anatel, the telecom regulator, logged 1.35 million complaints in 2025, the first increase after years of decline. Billing drove it, up 13.6 percent. In the monthly data for April 2026, billing was 33 percent of every complaint filed. One in three.
That’s where Canada is heading if the mid-year CCTS trend holds. It might already be there.
What I’d check this quarter
One customer, one record, enforced at the point the record is born. Not a quarterly dedupe. Every new account checked against the base before it gets a number, a welcome email, or a promo credit.
Treat an unsubscribe as a data fix, not a flag. When someone withdraws consent, find every record that is them, including the ones with the old email and the maiden name, and fix all of them. The CRTC’s penalties this year were for the records that got missed.
Validate the bill against the contract, every line, every cycle. BMO’s error was a start date. TD’s was a frequency. Both lived in a field nobody rechecked for a decade. Banco Carrefour runs around 5 million personalized communications a month through a 100 percent check before send, and the discipline isn’t the volume. It’s that nothing goes out carrying a number that disagrees with the contract.
Watch new accounts the way a fraud desk does. A contact channel that changes twice in 90 days, an address shared with other new accounts, a limit request before the first statement. Those are data checks. They belong in the same pipeline that validates the bill.
Audit what you send to the credit bureaus. The CCTS says that category grew 27 percent last year. The Calgary man’s four black strikes came from a record that was never his.
The record is the product
Here’s where I’ve landed after a year of looking at Canadian billing from the outside. Marketing and billing teams think they have different data problems. They have the same one. The duplicate that wastes a campaign is the duplicate that misbills a customer is the duplicate that gets reported wrong to Equifax. It’s one record, wrong once, costing you three times.
That’s what hiperValidation and hiperCCM are for: checking 100 percent of billing and customer data before anything goes out, and turning the message that follows into something a real customer reads and a fake one can’t use. We’ve been doing it for Brazil’s largest banks and telcos through the whole run of numbers above.
If you’d like to see how many of your records are twins, and what the bill looks like once they aren’t, Request a Demo (https://fastmovn.com/en/home/#request-a-demo).
Fast Movn is a Canadian technology company based in Vancouver, BC. Our platform pairs hiperValidation, which checks 100 percent of billing data before it reaches the customer, with hiperCCM, which turns the bill into a personalized, multichannel conversation. We work with telecom, financial services and utility companies across Brazil and North America.
Sources
– Global News, “Alberta man says Telus billing error wrecked his credit score,” January 9, 2024 (three accounts, collections, “four black strikes,” about $36). https://globalnews.ca/news/10214864/alberta-man-telus-bill-credit-score-collections/
– Validity, “The State of CRM Data Management in 2025,” July 9, 2025 (602 respondents; 76 percent, 37 percent). https://www.validity.com/resource-center/the-state-of-crm-data-management-in-2025/
– Validity, “5 Things We Learned from Evaluating 264 Billion CRM Records,” 2024 (47 percent of emails invalid or risky). https://www.validity.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/5-Things-We-Learned-from-Evaluating-264-Billion-CRM-Records.pdf
– CRTC, undertaking by Indeed Canada Corp., August 10, 2026 ($200,000, messages to people who had withdrawn consent). https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/archive/2026/ut260810.htm
– CRTC, undertaking by PH Canada Company (Pizza Hut), October 1, 2026 ($500,000, no consent, unsubscribe not honoured within 10 business days). https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/archive/2026/ut261001.htm
– Arkose Labs, Q4 2025 Threat Actor Patterns report, December 17, 2025 (fake account creation 46 percent, sign-up flows the weakest link). https://www.arkoselabs.com/latest-news/arkose-labs-report-reveals-explosive-growth-in-sms-toll-fraud-and-precision-targeted-attacks
– HUMAN Security, 2026 State of AI Traffic and Cyberthreat Benchmark Report (fake accounts per customer 217,911 in 2023 to 1,481,738 in 2025). https://www.humansecurity.com/wp-content/uploads/HUMAN_Report_2026-State-of-AI-Traffic-and-Cyberthreat-Benchmark.pdf
– CCTS, 2024-25 Annual Report, released January 14, 2026 (23,647 complaints; billing 46 percent; 6,001; 3,964; third-party credit reporting up 27 percent). https://pub.ccts-cprst.ca/2024-2025-annual-report/topics-trends/ and https://pub.ccts-cprst.ca/2024-2025-annual-report/2024-25-complaints/
– CCTS, 2025-26 Mid-Year Report, April 29, 2026 (complaints up 61 percent, incorrect monthly charges up 66 percent). https://www.ccts-cprst.ca/?p=12394
– FCAC, Summary of Proceeding #4 (Bank of Montreal), published February 2, 2026. https://www.canada.ca/en/financial-consumer-agency/services/industry/commissioner-decisions/summary-proceeding-4.html
– FCAC, Summary of Proceeding #3 (Toronto-Dominion Bank), published September 29, 2025. https://www.canada.ca/en/financial-consumer-agency/services/industry/commissioner-decisions/summary-proceeding-3.html
– FCAC, Summary of Proceeding #5 (Royal Bank of Canada), published June 25, 2026. https://www.canada.ca/en/financial-consumer-agency/services/industry/commissioner-decisions/summary-proceeding-5.html
– Equifax Canada, synthetic identity white paper, 2026 (doubled 2022 to 2024; 18 to 24 months; “digital dust”; “miscategorized as bad debt”). https://assets.equifax.com/marketing/canada/assets/reports_white_papers/syntheticid_whitepaper_en.pdf
– TransUnion Canada, business leader fraud study, October 8, 2025 (synthetic identity 18 to 26 percent; telecom suspected digital fraud rate 0.2 percent). https://newsroom.transunion.ca/canadian-business-leaders-say-fraud-cost-their-businesses-72-of-equivalent-revenues-synthetic-identity-fraud-losses-surge–transunion-study/
– Serasa Experian, Mapa da Fraude, first half of 2026, August 26, 2026 (2,860,957 attempts, up 32.9 percent, telephony 22.1 percent). https://www.serasaexperian.com.br/sala-de-imprensa/prevencao-a-fraude/brasil-registra-quase-3-milhoes-de-tentativas-de-fraude-de-identidade-no-1-semestre-aponta-serasa-experian/
– Teletime, Anatel Panorama de Reclamações 2025, March 19, 2026 (1,354,791 complaints, up 6.9 percent; billing up 13.6 percent). https://teletime.com.br/19/03/2026/reclamacoes-anatel-2025/
– Conexis Brasil Digital, Anatel complaints April 2026 (billing 33 percent of complaints). https://conexis.org.br/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/202604_RECLAMACOES-ANATEL.pdf
– Banco Carrefour and Hiperstream case study (about 5 million personalized communications a month), Fast Movn internal.