TRAI Acts on Finding Secret Calls, Messages; Dealing with Financial Fraud
Telecom regulator TRAI on Monday said it is working on various technologies to detect sensitive calls and messages and a joint action plan with other regulators to curb financial fraud.
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has said that Unsolicited Commercial Communications (UCC) or unsolicited communications are a major source of public nuisance and impact on people’s privacy.
“Complaints against Unregistered Telemarketers (UTM) are now being reported, where there has been a significant increase in the push of various types of UCC SMS. Additionally, UCC calls are also one of the concerns that must be addressed equally with UCC SMS,” it said. .
TRAI in collaboration with various stakeholders is taking necessary steps to check UCC in UTMs as well. These measures include implementation of UCC identification system, provision of Digital Consent, smart scrubbing of message headers and templates, using AI (Artificial Intelligence) and ML (Machine Language), etc,” the statement said.
To curb the menace of bogus calls and messages, TRAI issued the Consumer Preferred Telecommunications Regulations, 2018 which created an ecosystem based on blockchain (Distributed Ledger Technology-DLT).
The law mandates the registration of all sales promoters and telemarketers to register on the DLT platform and seek the consent of customers to receive various types of marketing messages at a time and date of their choice.
Under this framework, around 2.5 lakh primary organizations are registered with over 6 lakh topics and around 55 lakh authorized message templates to be sent to consumers through registered telemarketers and TSPs using DLT platforms.
The regulator said the framework has led to a significant drop in customer complaints of up to 60 percent for registered telemarketers. However, unregistered nuisance callers continue to spam mobile phone subscribers.
TRAI said it has also taken the initiative to establish a Joint Committee of Regulators (JCOR) comprising the Reserve Bank of India, Securities & Exchanges Board of India (Sebi) and Ministry of Consumer Affairs (MoCA) to establish a joint action plan to curb. Financial fraud using telecom services. “In the recent JCOR meeting held on November 10, 2022, which was attended by representatives of the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) and the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), measures to curb UCC were discussed at length,” TRAI. said.
