The new initiative aims at curbing the tactic cybercriminals adopt and pose as officials, fleecing gullible victims, and fortifying India’s defenses against these frauds.
The telecom majors of India, including Airtel and Jio, raised their concerns against the new regulation framed by TRAI in their latest declaration regarding the ban of OTPs. It said these new regulations would be introduced from 1 November; according to these new regulations, it is instructed to all telecom operators that all types of transactional messages related to e-commerce businesses as well as all service messages delivered to banks and other financial entities should carry traceability.
TRAI’s new norms have also mentioned that any message with an irregular sending chain should be blocked by the telecom companies, which can cause a disturbance in delivering OTPs and other alert messages.
Also read: The Top 5 Free Cybersecurity Training For Beginners
Telecom Asks For An Extension To Avoid Disruptions
It was TRAI that had instructed the telecommunication operators to monitor messages for banks and financial institutions at least as early as last August. Now, coming close to the November deadline, the telecom operators are agreeing to comply but reporting to the effect that many PE’s and telemarketing firms are not prepared for change.
Due to this lag in compliance, the PEs have demanded another 2 months for themselves, within which they would have been able to update their systems and avoid disturbance of message delivery. Further, it is said that this time in case of compliance may prevent wide OTP and transaction messages from disturbing the users all over the nation.
Government Anti-scam Efforts: Spoofed Call Prevention System
Besides these new rules, the Union Minister of Communications, Jyotiraditya Scindia, has recently added to this regime by introducing the International Incoming Spoofed Calls Prevention System.
The system is designed to prevent fraudulent calls masquerading as Indian numbers (+91) though sourced from abroad to befall Indian subscribers.
This weak point is being utilized by the cyber thieves for designing scams. They call themselves government officers and even create panic among the targeted victims.
Growing Threat Of Digital Scamming
In the wake of such an alarming increase in the sophistication of cybercrimes as varied as scams involving international spoofed calls, this new wave of anti-scam initiatives by TRAI has taken off.
In these frauds, fraudsters represent themselves as law enforcers, threaten the victim on video calls, and state that they are related to some illegal activities. They use this as an opportunity and demand their share, as fear is the major obstacle that makes the victim fall in line with the terms. The recent detection made by TRAI regarding this type of fraud reflects an increase in the requirement of stiff regulation to protect the consumer who becomes more digitalized.
OTP Regulatory: Consumer Impact
In case India’s telecom subscribers don’t accept the new requested extension, which changes in rules and regulations of TRAI are not accepted, the firm might face a temporary interruption for OTP delivery and transactional messages from 1st November.
Going by the current rule and step of the new measures set up by the government in securing communication through digital communication, all the same that may make this inconvenient, a little momentarily.
