Centre cracks down on spam calls, directs access service providers to take action

New Delhi, Aug 13 : The Centre on Tuesday directed all access service providers to immediately stop voice promotional calls, whether pre-recorded or computer generated, or from all unregistered senders or telemarketers.

In a major step to curb the increasing number of spam calls, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) mandated access service providers to take this action.

“All promotional voice calls from the unregistered senders/unregistered telemarketer (UTMs) using telecom resources shall be stopped immediately,” said the telecom regulatory authority body.

If any unregistered sender or unregistered telemarketer is found to be misusing its telecom resources for making commercial voice calls in violation of the regulations resulting into consumer complaints against any one or more number of resource indicators allocated to the sender, all the telecom resources of such sender shall be disconnected by the originating access provider (OAP) for a period up to two years as per the provisions of the regulation 25 of the regulations.

TRAI said the information regarding blacklisting of the sender will be shared by the OAP with all other access providers on the distributed ledger technology (DLT) platform, within 24 hours, who will, in turn, disconnect all the telecom resources given by them to that sender within the next 24 hours.

“No new telecom resources shall be allocated to such sender by any Access Provider during the period of blacklisting as provided for in the regulations,” said TRAI.

All access providers have been directed to comply with these directives and submit regular updates on the actions taken on the first and 16th of every month.

“This decisive action by TRAI is expected to significantly reduce spam calls and provide relief to consumers,” said the regulatory body.

Last week, the government warned access service providers and their delivery telemarketers to come forward and take effective measures to curb bulk communications and spam using voice calls.