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The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) on Thursday asked telecom operators to crack down on spammers that were slipping past protections introduced in recent years.
In a press release, the authority said it had issued two orders under the Telecom Commercial Communication Customer Preference Regulations, 2018, and the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India Act, 1997. The systems put in place following the 2018 regulations, which covered messages such as one-time passcodes (OTPs), were being subverted to deliver spam instead. As such, telcos had been ordered to reverify the SMS headers under which commercial SMS messages were sent.
TRAI ordered telcos to disallow commercial calls and texts from being placed using regular mobile numbers.
TRAI regulations on SMS spam are among the strictest in the world. “Transactional” messages, such as OTPs, could only be sent by an organisation if the template for such messages was logged on a blockchain ledger maintained by telecom operators. When this requirement was first implemented in 2021, many banks were briefly unable to send OTPs, as they had not registered their templates as required. The regulator then delayed implementation to allow time to comply.
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