TRAI's new instructions to carriers to combat unauthorized marketing calls

According to TRAI, it has come to their attention that some telemarketers are abusing the message templates and headers of Principal Entities(PEs).

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has given fresh instructions to telecom carriers under the TCCCPR-2018 to stop telemarketers from abusing Headers and Message Templates and to limit improper marketing utilizing telecom resources.

Mobile users can add their phone numbers to a National Do Not Call (NDNC) registry through the DND service offered by the Telecom Regulatory of India. Telemarketers are not permitted to make unauthorised calls or transmit promotional messages to the registered phone numbers. Telemarketers are obligated to abide by the rules or risk fines. All mobile subscribers in India, no matter which mobile network providers they use have access to the TRAI DND (Do Not Disturb) service.

According to TRAI, it has come to their attention that some telemarketers are abusing the message templates and headers of Principal Entities(PEs). To prevent this, it has requested that service providers re-authenticate all Headers and Message Templates registered on the Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) platform and prohibit any that have not been confirmed within a period of 30 and 60 days explicitly.

Providers of access are advised to:

• Within 30 and 60 days respectively, re-authenticate any Headers and Message Templates that have been registered on the DLT and ban any that have not.
• Make sure that interim headers are deleted as soon as the period of time for which they were created has passed.
• Make sure that the Message Template's content variables cannot be used to add unwanted content. Identifiable and traceable entities engaged in message transmission should used as needed.
• Clear up any misunderstanding among the intended audience and stop any abuse. Access Providers are not permitted to register any 'look-alike headers' under the names of various Principal Entities.

Access providers have been instructed to take action against communications transmitted by telemarketers who are not authorized or registered, including those who use phone numbers. Reducing the volume of unwanted advertising messages delivered to mobile users is the goal. These actions consist of mainly:

• Disallow all Telemarketers from performing message template cleaning and message delivery over the network of Access Providers if they are not registered on the DLT platform.
• Be sure that no promotional messages are sent by telemarketers who are not registered or who are using phone numbers.
• Any telemarketers that disobey the rules will be dealt with by the access service provider, who will also file legal claims in accordance with applicable legislation. The Access Service Provider must also alert other parties of information on these telemarketers so that they can stop these organisations from using their networks to deliver any type of commercial communication.

All Telecom Service Providers must follow the aforementioned instructions within 30 days, according to TRAI.

Distributed Ledger Technology, or DLT is a blockchain-based ecosystem that TRAI recently introduced to prevent Unsolicited Commercial Communication (UCC).