Legitimate business messages will now have further disclosure requirements.
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The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) on Wednesday (February 12, 2025) notified tighter rules for spam calls and SMS messages over telecom networks. Under the fresh amendment to the Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference Regulations (TCCCPR), 2018, telcos are required to accept complaints against spam after up to a week of receiving such calls, act on unregistered telemarketers faster (within five days), and impose lower tolerance thresholds for reported spammers.
Legitimate business messages will now have further disclosure requirements. “Customers will be able to identify the type of commercial message by just looking at its [SMS sender] header as “-P”, “-S”, “-T”, and “-G” will be suffixed to the message header for identification of promotional, service, transactional, and government messages, respectively,” TRAI said in a note accompanying the notification.
Repeated violators will face further action. “For the first violation of the regulatory threshold, outgoing services of all telecom resource[s] of the sender will be barred for 15 days,” TRAI says. “For subsequent violations, all telecom resources of the sender, including PRI/SIP trunks, will be disconnected across all access providers for a period of one year and the sender will be blacklisted.”
Financial disincentives of ₹2–10 lakh have also been prescribed for telcos who misreport the spam complaints they receive from users. Recent steps taken by telcos to block spam calls using Artificial Intelligence have now been baked into regulation. “Access providers are mandated to analyse call and SMS patterns based on parameters such as unusually high call volumes, short call durations, and low incoming-to-outgoing call ratios,” TRAI said.
The DND (Do Not Disturb) app, which has not been maintained in a long time, has been updated. The app allows users to report SMS and call spam to their telcos, and TRAI chairperson Anil Kumar Lahoti said that reporting was a crucial element to addressing spam in an interaction with presspersons.
Published – February 12, 2025 10:18 pm IST