India’s Telecom Regulatory Authority Decided Carriers Will Block Unregistered Telemarketers

• Carriers in India are to ban unregistered telemarketers that target victims with spam and scam calls.
• India's Telecom Regulatory Authority leaves the telcos to evaluate whether issuing the ban is adequate for each case.
• The blockchain-powered scam list method has seen a 60 percent drop in complaints regarding scam callers.

In an effort to reduce spam/scam calls, telcos in India are to “immediately stop” unregistered telemarketers issuing promotional calls via Telecom Resources and blacklist them for up to two years, as per India's Telecom Regulatory Authority (TRAI) PDF statement.

India's telecom watchdog was motivated to implement this measure due to a surge in complaints against unregistered telemarketers over the past 18 months, with 1.2 million filings in 2023 and south of 790,000 in the first half of 2024.

In recent years, scammers have impersonated representatives of popular and respected companies like FedEx and Blue Dart to persuade victims into giving up sensitive banking information via phishing links under the false urge of retrieving lost packages.

Under the new directive, telecom service providers would need to decide whether or not a caller violates India's regulations regarding scams and spam based on received complaints and submit updates on actions taken against scam callers every two weeks.

At the moment, an unregistered telemarketer first gets a warning, the second time, they are suspended for six months, and the third violation gets them banned. Sources say scammers usually take a primary rate interface (PRI) service from telcos, which provides them with 32 simultaneous connections and 320 numbers they put on a robotic dialler.

In the past years, telemarketers and enterprises making bulk calls have been asked to migrate their commercial messaging, such as one-time passwords, promotional messages, account balance updates, and more, to a blockchain mechanism.

Even though TRAI’s blockchain-powered scam list method has had issues with its one-time login codes and didn't ensure the registration of all relevant entities, the number of telesales-related complaints dropped by 60 percent between early 2021 and late 2022.

TRAI said in November 2022 that it would start using AI in this matter, but no update is available on this topic.