New Delhi:

Any telemarketer that makes spam calls or sends spam text from personal numbers will find the numbers disconnected. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has launched a major crackdown against those engaged in spam calls and text.

TRAI Chairman Anil Kumar Lahoti in an interview to NDTV Profit said entities connected to numbers that send spam will be blacklisted. At least 18 lakh numbers have been disconnected and over 800 entities have been blacklisted in the last three months, Mr Lahoti said.

“It’s a big menace for the privacy of telecom consumers. For registered telemarketers, TRAI has a comprehensive regulatory framework,” the telecom regulator’s Chairman said.

He said TRAI conducted a thorough analysis of how the system was being misused. For a start, all service providers have been ordered to remove unused content templates and headers to deal with the issue of spam messages.

TRAI has mandated that each message should have a binding of the principal entity sending the message.

“I want to complement the telecom industry for their efforts… The technical work in this regard is complete,” the TRAI Chairman said, adding there has been a perceptible fall in the number of spam messages and calls.

He said TRAI has made it mandatory for commercial calls to be made with a ‘140’ series number. To make commercial calls traceable, every such call is routed through the distributed ledger technology platform.

Those who have added their names in the ‘do not dial’ (DND) registry will not get commercial calls.

“The challenge is that sometimes commercial calls are genuinely important and must go through to avoid service deficiency. To tackle this, we are in talks with stakeholders to allocate another series of numbers for making service and transactional calls,” the TRAI Chairman said.

On the matter of fraudulent links sent to consumers via messages, the system is such that unless a link is whitelisted, the message will not pass through the distribution ledger tech platform, which means any message carrying a fraudulent link will not get through. So, consumers can open links sent on text messages without fear of fraud.

India’s telecom watchdog on Tuesday directed service providers to stop all promotional calls from unregistered callers and blacklist them as it looks to tackle a surge in spam and phishing calls that has seen people lose millions of rupees.

The government has been looking to clamp down on the spike in such calls including those where scammers pose as representatives of firms like FedEx and Blue Dart and extract sensitive financial information by sending phishing links in the pretext of retrieving lost packages.

“All promotional voice calls from the unregistered senders/unregistered telemarketer using Telecom Resources shall be stopped immediately,” the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India said in a statement shared by the government.

Such unregistered callers will be blacklisted for up to two years, the statement said, adding that telecom service providers would need to submit updates on action taken on scam callers on the 1st and 16th of every month.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)