Spam Call Complaints Down By 20% Since August 2024, Says TRAI

The number of complaints against unregistered senders and telemarketers engaging in the practice of spam call has gone down by about 20% since the telecom regulator came up with the direction to stop such voice calls.

In a press release dated Nov,. 20, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India stated that complaints against unregistered senders and telemarketers have gone down from around 1.89 lakh in August 2024 to 1.51 lakh in October 2024.

This reduction in the menace of spam calling has been witnessed after the TRAI issued a direction in August to all access service providers to stop voice promotional calls, whether pre-recorded or computer-generated, from all unregistered senders or telemarketers.

As a part its August directions, the regulator had said that if any unregistered sender is found to be misusing its telecom resources for making commercial voice calls, they will be blacklisted for up to two years.

Similarly, the regulator has been organising webinars for businesses that wish to send commercial messages to its customers and telemarketers regarding actions that are expected of them to curb the menace of spam messages.

These webinars have been organised to enforce the regulator's directions to deal with the issue of spam messages. In August, the regulator had issued a slew of directions such as mandating the migration of telemarketing calls starting with 140 series to the online DLT platform, allowing only whitelisted senders to send links through messages, and mandating the the traceability all messages.

Two webinars have been organised up until now, and these have seen participation from around 1800 representatives from entities being regulated by the RBI, SEBI, Pfrda, and Irdai. Another one, that is slated to be held on November 25, is also on the cards.

As a result of these efforts, more than 13,000 entites have already registered their chains with the respective access providers and further registration is in progress at a rapid pace, Trai said.