New Delhi, Aug 28, 2024, IANS

New Delhi, Aug 28 (IANS) The Centre has reiterated its call to protect mobile users from spam and fraud, asking stakeholders to ensure a more secure and efficient telecom ecosystem. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), in a meeting with representatives from IRDAI, PFRDA, RBI, SEBI, MoCA and MeitY, stressed the need for a joint effort to tackle the problem of spam messages and calls. TRAI Chairman Anil Kumar Lahoti urged the regulators to discuss and enable implementation of whitelisting of URLs, APKs, OTT links and call back numbers to be sent in SMS, migration of existing telemarketers making promotional calls to 140 series on the distributed ledger technology (DLT) platform and declaration of entire chain of telemarketers engaged by them for PE-TM chain binding. The meeting also explored potential collaborative efforts and strategies to address unsolicited commercial communication (UCC) and fraud through telecom resources. The government has observed several instances of misuse of headers and templates. Fraud takes place through the transmission of malicious links using the variable parts of the messages. In case of misuse of headers and content templates, it is difficult to find the entity that pushed the traffic. “Therefore, mandatory whitelisting of URLs, APKs, OTT links, or call back numbers, and declaration of entire chain of telemarketers engaged by them for PE-TM chain binding as per the timelines fixed by TRAI’s latest Directions needs to be enforced,” said the government. Several business entities make commercial voice calls using SIP/PRI lines with hundreds of indicators in violation of TRAI’s regulations. TRAI said that these entities should be migrated to the designated 140 series for making promotional calls. “Also, there is an urgent need to take firm action, without further delay, on spammers who are using PRI/SIP/bulk connections for making promotional voice calls/Robo calls/Pre-recorded calls,” the government stressed. TRAI also asked the industry stakeholders to enhance information exchange among regulators to control frauds using telecom resources.