Telecommunications body cracks down and disconnects personal numbers used for spam

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Any telemarketer that makes spam calls or sends spam text from personal numbers will find the numbers disconnected. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has launched a major crackdown against those engaged in spam calls and text.


TRAI Chairman Anil Kumar Lahoti in an interview to News Agency Profit said entities connected to numbers that send spam will be blacklisted. At least 18 lakh numbers have been disconnected and over 800 entities have been blacklisted in the last three months, Mr Lahoti said.


"It's a big menace for the privacy of telecom consumers. For registered telemarketers, TRAI has a comprehensive regulatory framework," the telecom regulator's Chairman said.


He said TRAI conducted a thorough analysis of how the system was being misused. For a start, all service providers have been ordered to remove unused content templates and headers to deal with the issue of spam messages.


TRAI has mandated that each message should have a binding of the principal entity sending the message.


"I want to complement the telecom industry for their efforts... The technical work in this regard is complete," the TRAI Chairman said, adding there has been a perceptible fall in the number of spam messages and calls.


He said TRAI has made it mandatory for commercial calls to be made with a '140' series number. To make commercial calls traceable, every such call is routed through the distributed ledger technology platform.


Those who have added their names in the 'do not dial' (DND) registry will not get commercial calls.


"The challenge is that sometimes commercial calls are genuinely important and must go through to avoid service deficiency. To tackle this, we are in talks with stakeholders to allocate another series of numbers for making service and transactional calls," the TRAI Chairman said.


On the matter of fraudulent links sent to consumers via messages, the system is such that unless a link is whitelisted, the message will not pass through the distribution ledger tech platform, which means any message carrying a fraudulent link will not get through. So, consumers can open links sent on text messages without fear of fraud.