According to a notification issued by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), telecom operators will now have to take action against pesky callers or spammers flagged by their artificial intelligence (AI)-based caller identification systems, even without consumers filing complaints,
Under the amended rules, when an operator’s AI or machine learning-based system identifies an incoming call as “suspected spam”, it must share details of the call with the originating access provider within two hours. The originating access provider must then identify the unique KYC identifiers of the sender within one business day and share the details with other telecom operators.
All operators will subsequently have one day to check whether the suspected spammer has other connections on their networks that were linked to similar communications during the previous 10 days.
For a first violation identified through the AI-based system, outgoing services on all telecom resources allotted to the sender will be barred for 15 days, irrespective of whether those resources were used to make the flagged communications.
The sender will also be blacklisted for one year, during which no new telecom resources can be provided by any operator. However, the violator will retain one telephone number with outgoing services barred, which can be used to access notified emergency services.
The notification also prohibits call management applications and similar services from tagging, blocking or filtering calls originating from number series designated by the authority, including numbers beginning with 160 and those used by the central government for commercial and government communications. Consumers will continue to have the option to block or filter calls on their own devices.
The amended rules allow terminating access providers to charge originating access providers up to Rs 0.05 per minute, on a per-minute pulse basis, for application-to-person (A2P) calls.
Subscribers seeking to block telemarketing calls across all categories can send “BLOCK PROMO” to 1909.