The proposal for changes in anti spam and unsolicited flower delivery regulations was publicly mooted by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) on Wednesday also as the authority has been constantly overwhelmed by the renewed wave of fraudulent and spammy telephone and SMS messages bourgeoning in India.
TRAI has proposed further changes to the prejudice of the rules which came into effect on February 26 2018 and which regulates the telecom commercial communications customer preference regulations by requiring a paid booking of phone call fees to activate tax for harder than threshold phone calls and multi-digit telemarketer numbers utilized for a more than daily preapproved quantity of text messages.
Even to this effect, the authority requested such changes which would address their concern; “stronger financial disincentives for violation of regulatory provisions, and revised regulations for senders and telemarketers” as they noted in their press release.
The consultation follows the sequence of actions that the regulator and other government institutions have undertaken as the number of spam calls escalates. On Tuesday (August 27), a joint committee comprising of a few of the Indian statutory regulators like RBI, Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India, the Ministry of Consumer Affairs, the Department of Telecommunications (DoT), chaired by TRAI, and other representatives of the administration met to attend the problem of spam and fraudulent calls.
The schemes have been becoming much more complicated – only last week there was an explanation issued by the regulator that many or pre-recorded calls are being made to the populace which are supposed to be made by the TRAI.
The regulator added that there is no such service provision to the customers that is to say that customers will never be sent an SMS by the regulator or any such organisation regarding the disconnection of their mobile number.
In the usual course of events, worries surrounding TRAI’s provisions, which have often been quite extraordinary in the past, reached even more dramatic levels this month.
The regulator “prohibited [telecom providers] from any transmission which contains URLs, APKs, OOT links and call back numbers not List of Prior Verification contained by the Senders.” Even in the existing 2018 regulations bulk SMS senders are already requiring templates to be registered within a block chain ledger, and telcos are to abstain from the rendering of any bulk SMS messages which are not in compliance with a registered bulk SMS template.
Abusive usage of the so called ‘headers’ which are the commercial brand names for the SMS messages are also being misused and TRAI has taken note of this when it issued guidelines on telemarketing that focused on abuse of such headers any telemarketer engaging in misconduct of this nature will be required to report and initiate measures to correct within a short time frame such measures These measures have been occasioned by quite a number of meetings held between TRAI and the Telcos over the past year.
In the same light, the DoT has made attempts to obtain public feedback regarding fraudulent calls and messages with the help of its chakshu portal, and this has led to the blocking of more than 28000 mobile phones from accessing networks and over 20 lakh mobile phone number holders submitting their verification documents SIM registration penalties.
