MoS Devusinh Chauhan reveals a significant increase in fake call centres, rising from 35 to 65, during Parliament session.
Communications Minister Devusinh Chauhan, responding to inquiries made during the winter session of parliament, shed light on the proliferation of fake call centers that engage in fraudulent activity.
Over the past three years, there have been a staggering number of illegal telecoms flats discovered – 35 in 2021-22, 62 in 2022-23 and 65 in 2023-24, and reports of individuals being defrauded through these channels.
The Minister said, “Such illegal arrangements are used to bypass International Long Distance Operators (ILDOs) for anti-national activities, cyber crimes and financial fraud etc.”
According to him, the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) in collaboration with Law Enforcement Agencies (LEA) and Telecommunication Service Providers (TSP) has been actively fighting these illegal activities. Measures taken include instructions to ILDOs to block incoming international calls with suspicious or incorrect Caller ID (CLI). In addition, DoT has taken steps to block apps that facilitate the initiation of scam calls by blocking their availability on popular app stores.
DoT’s efforts extend to citizen engagement through the Sanchar Saathi portal, which enables reporting of foreign calls using misleading Indian CLIs and verification of mobile connections to identify unauthorized subscriptions. More than 13,000,000 connections have been disconnected as a result of this initiative.
Chauhan stated that using advanced technology such as artificial intelligence and facial recognition, the DoT has identified and disconnected around 55.52 lakh suspicious mobile connections and taken action against over 70,000 points of sale (SIM agents) involved in selling these illegal connections.
MISUSE OF HEADINGS AND MESSAGE TEMPLATES
In addition, the minister addressed concerns about the misuse of headers and message templates by some telemarketers. DoT’s proactive approach involved AI/ML analysis targeting entities that send text messages through Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) platforms.
This analysis resulted in the removal of thousands of policy entities, SMS headers, and content templates – over 20,000 SMS headers, 30,000 SMS headers, and 1.95,000 SMS content templates.
TRAI reported more than 28,000 cases of abuse of header and content templates, prompting mobile companies to take action to blacklist them. The minister said: “Since 2019, over 20 telcos, around 500 suppliers, over 3,000 text message headers and over 40,000 content templates have been blacklisted for sending phishing SMS / Unsolicited Commercial Messages (UCC).”
To combat this, TRAI asked mobile operators to re-verify all headers and content models on DLT platforms and deactivate unverified ones. Strict measures were introduced to ensure compliance with the regulations. Several titles and content templates that did not meet the mandatory criteria were temporarily disabled.
Chauhan said, “Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference Regulations (TCCCPR 2018) require mobile operators to ensure that all commercial communications on their network are conducted only using header and content templates registered by senders on the DLT platform. Principal Entities (PEs) can send commercial communications by contacting registered telemarketers (RTM) or directly through the ecosystem developed and established by mobile companies.
“Furthermore, to prevent the transmission of advertising messages through unregistered telemarketers or telemarketers using 10-digit phone numbers, TRAI issued a directive on February 16, 2023. As per TRAI’s directive, around 4,000,000 titles and more than 11,000,000 content templates have been temporarily deactivated by mobile operators, the minister noted.
