Bombay: the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India‘s (Trai’s) exercise to perform distributed ledger technology (DLT) to check fraudulent messages failed because it failed to contain the threat well into the mechanism’s implementation, Route Mobile chef Rajdip Gupta told ET.
The implementation process, which started in 2019, is stuck in the third phase: collecting consumer consent to receive messages from companies.
“I think (Trai’s attempt to implement DLT) itself is a big failure. DLT itself should take care of the threat of SMS phishing primarily if all senders were properly registered from day one,” Gupta added.
He also said the process of collecting consent under Trai’s DLT mandate is cumbersome for enterprises in a country with a huge mobile phone user base, such as India.
“I think the regulator needs to understand why DLT failed. It needs to take a strong stance on DLT to ensure operators are following the right practices and properly verifying those central (registered) IDs,” Gupta said.
DLT or distribution ledger technology is a blockchain-based solution that the industry regulator has mandated for all operators to control spam messages.
Essentially, legitimate marketers and telemarketing agencies must register themselves, the headers (the code seen when receiving messages from a brand), and the message templates on the DLT platform. Only registered senders with valid headers and matching templates are allowed to send messages under this regime.
According to industry estimates, approximately 5 million headers and templates have been registered on the DLT to date. However, the problem of scam messages and unsolicited commercial communications over text continues to plague consumers, and Trai has asked telcos in a recent directive to remove unused and invalid headers and templates from the ledger. authorization platform in the coming months to address the issue of obtaining consumer consent to accelerate the third phase of the implementation process.
Route Mobile, which started out as a communications platform as a service (CPaaS) provider, has identified security solutions as a functional area of business. The security solutions company is housed in a newly launched business unit called True Sense, which provides an application programming interface for mobile identity verification to enterprises.
The products under this unit range from SIM swap detection to KYC guided identity verification that can identify scams and bots where applicable.