Telemarketing entities or SMS service resellers must be brought under the government’s licensing regime to hold them accountable for culprits passing spam messages across the delivery value chain, otherwise “this piecemeal approach” will yield no results. positive result, argued the telecommunications companies.

More than 2,80,000 businesses in India send commercial SMS, aggregated by 16,000 telemarketing aggregators. These are then transmitted to 15 delivery telemarketers who are connected to each telecommunications company to transfer all commercial SMS traffic. Thus, telecom operators do not have visibility into the SMS delivery chain beyond these 15 senders and therefore cannot control spam, they say.

“TM-D is clearly a service reseller and should either be licensed as a VNO or authorized by the DoT under the upcoming authorization regime under the Indian Telecom Act, 2023,” Reliance Jio said in its submission to an ongoing industry consultation on TCCCP regulations to prevent spam.

Airtel further added that if such license or authorization is not possible, then direct connectivity between telecom companies and lead entities (commercial shippers) should be mandatory.

According to the figures above, such an arrangement could push 16,000 telemarketing entities out of business.

Telecom operators have once again highlighted that the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) is ignoring the “parallel spam market” emerging on OTT platforms such as WhatsApp, which are the “primary accomplices of spam”. fraud by carrying fraudulent URLs/APKs/CTAs”, Jio. “This lack of (uniform) regulation has led to differential treatment to control spam between OTT platforms and TSPs,” Airtel said. On the other hand, to control spam from personal numbers, the telecommunications regulator had asked whether a differential tariff for these entities could constitute a punitive measure aimed at discouraging these spammers.

Jio argued that such “approach is flawed and needs to be revamped to regulate the real culprit, i.e. PE/TM, instead of punishing consumers through differential tariffs.”

Airtel suggested that TRAI may consider measures such as shifting costs towards initiation attempts rather than termination.

Vodafone Idea supported the Authority’s suggestion but cautioned that the same should be done after further analysis and careful consideration to avoid greater impact on genuine consumers.

According to the analysis, nearly 14 lakh SIMs made between 50 and 1,000 calls per day during the period January-March 2024, TRAI had said in its consultation paper released in August. Four SIMs made more than 1000 calls per day! These are probably spam callers who do not follow the TRAI standards set for sales calls.

Similarly, there were 4 lakh SIM cards sending more than 50 SMS per day. Even though telecom companies have blocked 59,000 such numbers in calendar years 2022-23, these spammers continue to buy new SIM cards, TRAI showed.

Among other notable suggestions regarding the consultation, Truecaller suggested that for spam reporting and complaint handling, TRAI needs to formally integrate third-party applications into its framework. He also demanded that TRAI clarify the definition of international traffic.