Display ‘International Call’ for calls from abroad to curb scams: DoT to telecos

DoT reports a 95.6% drop in fake international calls shown as Indian numbers, falling from 13.5 million daily in October to 600K daily in December.

The Department of Telecommunications wants all telecom service providers to display ‘international call’ on the phone when subscribers receive calls from outside India to curb cyber scams where scammers masquerade as Indian government and its authorities to dupe people in the country, the department said in a press release on Tuesday. Airtel has already started doing this and other telcos are exploring the feasibility of the move.

The DoT warned that now scammers were impersonating government authorities by making calls that displayed numbers beginning with +8, +85 and +65. (Representational image)

This recommendation was made by a dedicated task force that the DoT had created to address the issue of scam calls originating from outside the country.

The DoT said that the number of incoming international calls that are falsely displayed as originating from Indian numbers on caller ID that its new system identified and blocked had dipped from 13.5 million a day in October to about 600,000 a day in December, a drop of 95.6%.

For the DoT, this indicates that their new system, launched in October, has “successfully tackled the issue of cyber-crimes that were being conducted through calls that were being made from abroad, but the CLI [calling line identity] was tampered to look as Indian number”. This system, called the “International Incoming Spoofed Calls Prevention System”, can detect and block such calls before they are even picked up by people in India. Such calls have been used by scammers abroad to target people in India by masquerading as police, FedEx employees, and others.

However, the DoT warned that now scammers were impersonating government authorities by making such calls that displayed numbers beginning with +8, +85 and +65.

In October, India received about 15 million calls that hit the telcos’ international long-distance network and display a +91 number on the caller ID. This means, the spoofed calls (where the call originates from a non-Indian number but is displayed as an Indian number) accounted for about 90% of all international calls that display +91 in October.