File picture for illustration.
| Photo Credit: REUTERS
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) on Thursday requested telecom operators to crack down on spammers that had been slipping previous protections launched in recent times.
In a press launch, the authority stated it had issued two orders underneath the Telecom Commercial Communication Customer Preference Regulations, 2018, and the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India Act, 1997. The techniques put in place following the 2018 rules, which lined messages resembling one-time passcodes (OTPs), had been being subverted to ship spam as a substitute. As such, telcos had been ordered to reverify the SMS headers underneath which industrial SMS messages had been despatched.
TRAI ordered telcos to disallow industrial calls and texts from being positioned utilizing common cellular numbers.
TRAI rules on SMS spam are among the many strictest on the planet. “Transactional” messages, resembling OTPs, may solely be despatched by an organisation if the template for such messages was logged on a blockchain ledger maintained by telecom operators. When this requirement was first carried out in 2021, many banks had been briefly unable to ship OTPs, as they’d not registered their templates as required. The regulator then delayed implementation to permit time to comply.
