India’s telecom authority seeks to end spam calls, blacklist offenders

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has issued a directive to service providers seeking an immediate end to all voice promotional calls from unregistered telemarketers, in a bid to curb spam and phishing calls. The strict course of action initiated by the telecom regulatory body includes blacklisting of perpetrators for up to two years.

Apart from the nuisance factor, the clampdown is aimed at curbing pesky callers who pose as representatives of various organisations offering customer services in order to extract personal financial information of victims and, in turn, drain bank accounts.

TRAI has now issued a directive with guidelines for telecom operators and other access providers to put an end to computer-generated or pre-recorded promotional voice calls from sources that are not registered.

“All promotional voice calls from the unregistered senders/unregistered telemarketer (UTMs) using telecom resources shall be stopped immediately,” the TRAI directive said.

Access providers have also been told to regularly update TRAI on the action they take to follow the guidelines of the regulatory body. These updates have to be submitted twice every month, on the 1st and the 16th.

TRAI has declared there will be penalties for those violating the latest set of regulations. The regulatory body’s directive mandates that an Originating Access Provider (OAP) must disconnect all telecom resources allocated to an unregistered sender for a maximum period of two years, if such a person is discovered to be misusing resources by making commercial calls, in the process drawing customer complaints.

The telecom regulatory body’s directive further stated that details about such errant telemarketers who have been blacklisted must be circulated among access providers using the designated Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) within a day. The idea is to collaboratively block unregistered senders from misusing telecom resources.

“This decisive action by TRAI is expected to significantly reduce spam calls and provide relief to consumers,” the regulatory body stated.