During the time when fraud calls and messages continue to affect our lives, the telecom department seems to have a crackdown on fraud calls and messages.
DoT Deactivating Fraud Numbers
With the help of Sanchar Saathi portal – that enables citizens to report suspicious numbers – has disconnected over 3.5 lakh fraud numbers in the last 15 days and more than ‘one crore fraud numbers’ till date, said the Department of Telecom (DoT).
Further DoT said, “Huge 1 crore fraud numbers disconnected via Sanchar Saathi,” in a post on X.
Moving ahead, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India(TRAI) has also directed telecom operators to disconnect and blacklist entities using bulk connections for spam calls, including robocalls and pre-recorded calls in order to control the menace of spam calls.
The Ministry noted, “In the last fortnight over 3.5 lakh such numbers have been disconnected and 50 entities have been blacklisted. In addition, around 3.5 Lakh unused/ unverified SMS headers and 12 Lakh content templates are blocked.”
Further communicating, “The DoT launched a citizen centric platform, Sanchar Saathi (https://sancharsaathi.gov.in), to fight cyber fraud, enabling citizens to report suspicious calls and messages. Till date more than one crore fraudulent mobile connections have been disconnected with the help of Sancharsaathi. Further, 2.27 lakh mobile handsets have been blocked for involvement in cybercrime /financial frauds.”
Prior to this, Center issued directions to Telecom Service Providers(TSPs) like Reliance Jio, Airtel and Vodafone Idea to block incoming international spoofed calls during May.
They have an interesting revelation that these calls which appear to have originated within India but in reality are made by cyber-criminals from abroad by manipulating the calling line identity.
Moving ahead in this development, DoT and the TSPs informed that they have developed a system to identify and block incoming international spoofed calls.
Tightened Rules to Improve Network Performance
It appears that the benchmarks for key parameters like network availability, call drop rates, and packet drop rates are to be gradually tightened to ensure improvement in the network performance, according to the ministry.
The TRAI has released its revised regulations, ‘The Standards of Quality of Service of Access (Wirelines and Wireless) and Broadband (Wireline and Wireless) Service Regulations, 2024 (06 of 2024)’ in this regard.
These regulations will be effective from October 1.
The monthly monitoring of the Quality of Service performance of mobile service will be started instead of a quarterly basis from 1st April next year.
