Collaboration helps cybercrime fighters ‘paint full picture,’ event participants say

OTTAWA — A large video screen displays a running tally of statistics as dozens of people hunch over laptops, a freshly formed hivemind in the fight against cybercrime.

Operation Maple Disruption 2.0 is underway.

The event, which ran Nov. 2 to 6 in Ottawa, brought together partners working for more than 50 organizations — from banks and police forces to a large social media firm and securities commissions. It built on the first such event that took place last year.

It was organized by the RCMP’s National Cybercrime Co-ordination Centre and the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre to pinpoint and disable tools used to commit cybercrime and fraud such as investment scams and identity theft.

Organizers say over the course of the week, partners co-ordinated thousands of disruptive actions against a host of fraud enablers.

The measures included disabling email accounts associated with fraudulent activity, blocking phone numbers used to facilitate fraud, removing or blocking fraudulent websites, flagging, blocking, or cancelling suspicious transactions, and blocklisting cryptocurrency addresses connected to illicit activity.

In all, action was taken on 4,264 reports of fraudulent activity, with a total of $1.06 million recovered, the RCMP says.

Beyond these tallies, the organizers hope the connections forged during the week-long operation will carry over into future efforts to tackle online fraud — a battle that benefits from the combined expertise of specialists who might not otherwise cross paths.

Participant Octavia Howell, chief information security officer at credit data company Equifax Canada, said no one industry can fight online fraud alone, so bringing people together under one roof helps analysts draw better conclusions.

“The worst thing we would want to do is make an assumption that someone’s a fraudster, and they’re not,” she said. “So we’re able to paint a full picture because of the collaboration that’s in the room.”

Maple Disruption was designed with the idea of participants being equal partners, said Chris Lynam, director general of the National Cybercrime Co-ordination Centre and the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre.

Information of interest might be sent to all the banks taking part, prompting their representatives to compare notes and have a conversation, he said.

“They see that maybe the money was transferred from their bank to the next, and they go off into another room here and start figuring out, OK, like what can we do further as a sector?”

The RCMP’s Daniel Foy, officer in charge of the anti-fraud centre, said the collaborative nature of the event helps speed up investigations.

“When you consider the fact that we have to pick up the phone, send out emails, wait for days to get responses, now we can get answers right away sometimes or within minutes. So this is the value of what we’re doing here, and the partnerships that are created amongst the financial institutions, and seeing competitors work together for a common cause, that’s very important,” Foy said.

“The sidebar discussions that we see this week are, to me, great value because people are exchanging their best practices. They’re making links on the fly.”

Individual players concerned about cybercrime each have small pieces of the puzzle, said Graeme Bunton, executive Director of the NetBeacon Institute, an initiative dedicated to reducing online harms.

“Maple Disruption enabled us to get a bunch of those puzzle pieces together, so we can have a bigger view of the cybercrime that’s happening, and then take a good shot at trying to make that stop.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 10, 2026.

Jim Bronskill, The Canadian Press