New Delhi: The government has blacklisted key entities that were transmitting fraudulent messages for mobile users. In addition, 73 SMS headers and 1,522 content templates owned by these top entities have also been blacklisted.
The Telecommunications Department (Point), in cooperation with the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MHA) has taken this decisive action to protect citizens from possible SMS fraud through the Sanchar Saathi initiative, the government said in a statement on Monday.
The move comes amid an ongoing government crackdown on those indulging in mobile phone fraud Texting. According to the National Cybercrime According to Reporting Portal, Indians lost over Rs1,750 crore to cybercriminals from January to April, with over 7.4 lakh cybercrime complaints registered.
According to Indian Cybercrime Coordination Center (I4C), an average of 7,000 cybercrime complaints were registered per day in May 2024, the majority of which concerned financial fraud.
“The Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Center (I4C), MHA, has provided information regarding misuse of eight SMS headers for sending fraudulent communications for committing cybercrime,” the DoT said in the statement.
Research has shown that more than 10,000 fraudulent messages have been sent with these eight headers in the past three months. “The main entities that owned these eight SMS headers were blacklisted. All 73 SMS headers and 1,522 SMS content templates owned by these key entities have been blacklisted,” the statement said.
After the blacklisting, none of these entities, SMS headers or templates can now be used to send SMS messages via any telecom operator.
“The DOT has prevented further potential victimization of citizens by blacklisting these entities. DoT reiterates its commitment to protect citizens from cybercrime,” the DoT added.
As per the mandate of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai), only the registered main entities can send promotional and marketing messages to mobile consumers. As part of the mandate, telecom companies were asked to move all commercial messages (one-time passwords, promotional messages, account balance updates, etc.) to the blockchain-based platform.
Companies sending commercial text messages were required to register themselves, the headers (the sender code unique to their company) and message templates on the blockchain-based distributed ledger technology, and only registered and verified companies were allowed to send text messages to customers.
Furthermore, it is not permitted to use mobile numbers for telemarketing activities. If a consumer uses his telephone connection to send advertising messages, the connection will be disconnected upon the first complaint and his name and address may be blacklisted for a period of two years.
Telemarketing calls can be recognized by their prefixes: 180, 140 and 10-digit numbers are not allowed for telemarketing.
