Trai move to curb fraud could ring in an SMS outage next month
Consumers may face disruptions in getting service and transactional messages from banks, financial institutions and ecommerce firms on their mobile phones from next month following a telecom regulator move aimed at curbing spam, specifically phishing attempts.
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) has asked telcos to stop transmitting messages containing URLs, OTT links, APKs (Android application packages) or call-back numbers that are not whitelisted--or registered with telcos--by senders from September 1.
The regulator's ultimatum means banks, financial institutions and online platforms must get their templates and content registered with operators by the August 31 deadline, failing which messages containing these elements will be blocked.
Currently, entities get their headers and templates registered with telcos but not the content of messages. This means that operators don't undertake scrubbing or checking the content of transmitted messages. But effective next month, telcos have to create a mechanism that can read the content of commercial messages, and block those that do not match its records, experts say.
In India, 1.5-1.7 billion commercial messages are sent every day, taking the total to about 55 billion every month, according to industry data.
Industry executives say the telecom sector is currently seeking some more time from Trai for implementing the mandate as the blockchain-based distributed ledger technology (DLT) platform needs to be updated.
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