Blitz Bureau
NEW DELHI: An indigenously-developed system to identify and block international spoofed calls that display Indian mobile numbers has significantly brought down such calls to about 4 lakh per day, the Government has informed.
Further, the Government asked Indian Telcos to initiate drive against foreign carriers or aggregators who are handing over spoofed international calls, and they have blocked more than 20 such carriers to date.
The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) recently launched an indigenously-developed International Incoming Spoofed Calls Prevention System, along with all telecom service providers (TSPs).
The tool proved to be a formidable barrier that blocked 90% of all the incoming international calls which were identified as spoofed calls — approximately 1.35 crore, in just 24 hours, indicating that the system’s success in tackling the issue of cyber-crimes using spoofed calls from abroad.
Fraudsters were earlier using international spoofed calls that displayed Indian mobile numbers (+91-xxxxx) to deceive Indian citizens and carrying out cyber-crimes and financial frauds.
Though these calls appear to originate from within India, they are actually made from abroad through manipulation of the Calling Line Identity (CLI), commonly referred to as phone number.
With the successful implementation of the system, scammers abroad changed their modus operandi and now they have started spoofing using international numbers.
To counter this, DoT has asked telecom service providers to display “International Calls” on all calls coming from outside India.
This helps the citizen to understand that since the incoming calls is an “International Call”, it cannot be from organisations like DoT, TRAI, police, RBI, customs, UIDAI etc.
One of the major service providers has already implemented this in its network and others are in process of doing so, according to Ministry of Communications.
