TRAI’s new rule to prevent fake SMS and fraud: Now pre-tagging with commercial SMS is mandatory, companies will have to make changes within 60 days

Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has now taken a strict step to stop fake SMS and phishing activities. TRAI has instructed all the telecom companies of the country that the ‘variable components’ present in all SMS templates sent for commercial communication will now have to be pre-tagged.

This rule will especially target those unregistered links and fraud call back numbers, which are used by fraudsters to trap common people. Companies have been given 60 days to implement this rule.

If you are also one of those people, who keep receiving fake SMS in the name of some bank, financial service or online shopping company throughout the day and you ignore them due to fear of fraud. So this is a relief news for you.

What is TRAI’s new ‘pre-tagging’ rule?

This new rule of TRAI is mainly related to dynamic content used in SMS templates. Variable components refer to those parts of the message that can change for each receiver. As…

Under the new rule, the Principal Entity (PE) sending the message, i.e. the company sending the message, will have to specify what is going to come in the variable fields while registering the template.

For example, if a URL is to appear there, it must be explicitly tagged as #url#. If any number is to come, it will be mandatory to tag it as #number#.

How will fraud be controlled?

Earlier these variable fields were not tagged, which was directly taken advantage of by fraudsters. They used to secretly insert malicious links or numbers in the name of any bank or government scheme in the approved message template, which helped them in committing financial fraud. Since there was no identification or tagging of these fields, telecom providers were not able to identify them.

Now after pre-tagging, access providers i.e. telecom companies will be able to automatically identify and check these fields. With this they will be able to find out whether the link or number entered is from whitelisted domains or numbers or not. If it contradicts the tag or contains a fraud link, the message will be blocked there. TRAI has clarified that this step will further strengthen the anti-spam and anti-fraud framework.

Companies will have to make changes in 60 days

TRAI has given access providers and principal entities 60 days to make necessary changes in their existing SMS templates. That means, if lakhs of old templates of a company are approved, then they will have to be updated according to this new pre-tagging rule within 60 days.

After the end of this compliance window, if any message is sent using a non-compliant template, the telecom company will reject it and the message will not reach the customer. In a way, this is a direct challenge to those sending fraud messages.

Trust in digital communication will increase again

This new rule further strengthens TRAI’s Telecom Commercial Communication Customer Preference Regulations (TCCCPR) 2018. The objective of which is to completely ban unauthorized commercial communication. TRAI believes that this initiative will increase public safety and restore people’s trust in digital messaging channels.

These channels are very important for communication of banking, financial services, government and other essential services. Now every variable field will be validated before transmission, which will almost eliminate the scope for fraud.

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