Government Deactivates More than 85 lakh Mobile Numbers in crackdown on fraud and Cybercrime

In the last few years, cases of cybercrime and fraud have increased rapidly. To curb this problem, some measures have also been taken by the Central Government. In this series, the Telecom Department (DoT) has disconnected more than 85 lakh mobile connections. Of these, there were more than 78 lakh mobile connections which were made using fake documents.

Apart from this, more than six lakh mobile connections were linked to cybercrime. Recently DoT had implemented a tool based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) to increase security in the telecom sector. These mobile connections have been disconnected after the analysis done on this tool. DoT has also strengthened the Know Your Customer (KYC) framework for issuing mobile connections and new guidelines in this regard have been introduced for telecom companies. Under these guidelines, telecom companies will have to do strict verification of all Point of Sale (PoS).

The new rule of Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) called message traceability has also come into effect from December 11. This rule will help in reducing spam messages. This rule was to be implemented from December 1 but it was postponed on the request of telecom companies. However, the actual deadline for this was October 31.

With the new system, the person sending the message can be tracked till its delivery. With this, the involvement of telemarketers and other parties in sending messages can be detected. TRAI has said that this rule will not cause delay in receiving important messages like one-time password (OTP). OTP is used for banking and other services. In the new system, such promotional and spam messages which are not sent by registered firms will be blocked. More than 27,000 firms have registered for this. Bharti Airtel, one of the big telecom companies, had said earlier this week that it has been warned of more than 8 billion spam calls on its network. About two and a half months ago, the company had launched an AI-based solution to deal with the problem of spam calls and messages. After this, the company’s subscribers are warned about receiving spam calls and messages.