By Ahmad Hathout
Telus said in an application to the CRTC that it intends to temporarily lock all of its devices for a 60-day period beginning July 30 to stop what it claims is increasing incidents of theft.
“Given the magnitude of the ongoing public safety crisis and the unrecoverable financial harm being sustained daily, TELUS advises the Commission that it intends to implement a temporary 60-day device lock on all new device activations on July 30, 2026,” the Vancouver-based telecom said in a Part 1 application, made public Wednesday.
The temporary move is intended to last as long as the CRTC needs to evaluate that application, which asks the regulator to cement in the Wireless Code that 60-day device lock period to combat theft. The theft, which Telus says has increased because the resale opportunity for unlocked devices is much higher than for locked ones, can take the form of violent, organized robberies or subscription fraud, where a criminal can adopt the identity of a legitimate customer to sign up for a service plan with a $0 phone with no intention of paying for it through their monthy bills.
The proposed lock, as such, would only apply to subsidized or financed devices provided in conjunction with a contract and will automatically be unlocked after the period for free “provided that the associated account is in good standing,” Telus says, adding the fastest growing fraud in the telecom industry is subscription fraud.
That fraud, Telus conveys, creates victims out of the telecom and the individual with legitimate credit, who may see their identity, obtained via a security breach, used to sign up for such plans with $0 phones or who may be duped by receiving a dollar amount from a criminal to voluntarily sign up for a similar plan, hand the phone over to the criminal, and be left holding the debt on the phone — called credit muling.
Telus argues that the CRTC recognized this problem when, in the 2013 Wireless Code, it allowed carriers a 90-day lock period to confirm the legitimacy of the relationship with the customer. Four years later, in 2017, it banned the practice because it created a barrier to switching.
“These schemes rely on the fraudsters’ ability to monetize or activate the device immediately after obtaining it,” Telus argues. “If devices were shipped locked to the service provider’s network for an initial period following activation, the usability and resale value of such fraudulently obtained devices would substantially diminish. Further, if unlocking could only occur while the device is connected to the originating service provider’s network, any request for early unlocking would give the service provider an additional opportunity to verify and confirm the account information, and potentially detect the fraudulent activity before the device was diverted.”
Telus notes that stolen devices are rarely activated in Canada because carriers will block that phone’s IMEI number from being activated when it’s reported stolen. The caveat, Telus says, is that many countries do not participate in this GSMA blacklist effort. “Therefore, devices are trafficked out of Canada to these countries or to regions with lower regulatory enforcement,” Telus says in its application. “The destination markets pay a premium for these clean, unlocked North American handsets.”
Carriers have argued that the CRTC’s decision in 2017 would increase theft. “These crimes are threats to the safety of WSPs’ employees and physical retail locations and carry financial repercussions that are ultimately borne by legitimate wireless consumers in the rates that they pay,” Telus argues.
The dollar amount Telus claims to have lost since the CRTC’s 2017 ruling is redacted from its application, but it says the armed robberies are inflicting on frontline employees “irreversible psychological and physical trauma” and harming its reputation.
Telus had already been locking devices for 60 days before the advent of its application, which surfaced after the CRTC ordered it in December to stop the practice. By then, the regulator had made a similar request of Bell, which had been selling locked devices since April 2025 to combat crime.
“Bell’s move to begin locking phones has created comparable asymmetry between Canadian WSPs, as did the mix of voluntary and mandatory device locking standards in the US,” Telus claims in its application. “As other WSPs continue to leave their devices unlocked immediately post-activation, WSPs like TELUS, its retail staff, and its customers remain vulnerable to device fraud and theft campaigns perpetrated by bad actors. As a result, TELUS remains disadvantaged in the competitive marketplace.”
Bell did not respond to a request for comment about this claim. Rogers told Cartt only that it will respond to Telus’s application.
Telus’s application came before the CRTC launched, on June 30, a show-cause proceeding asking the Rogers, Bell and Telus to show why fees they have introduced recently are not in violation of the regulator’s prohibition on activation and modification fees, which came into effect earlier that month.
