Government Allots New '160' Number Series To Curb Telemarketing Spam Menace

The Department of Telecommunications on Thursday introduced a new numbering series—160—for service and transactional calls, in an attempt to help citizens differentiate between genuine service calls and unsolicited telemarketing.

The DoT defines service calls as those made to the recipient with consent, regarding commercial transactions, such as providing warranty information or product recall information about a commercial product or service used or purchased.

Transactional calls are also non-promotional calls for the purpose of critical alerts to its own customers or account holders.

Promotional calls are essentially cold calls or telemarketing spam, for which no explicit consent from the recipient has been taken.

Currently, the '140' series has been allocated to telemarketers for purposes of promotional, service and transactional voice calls.

However, the '140' series is being used extensively only for promotional calls, prompting consumers to not respond to many important service and transactional calls that come from similar looking numbers, according to the government.

"This has resulted in wide use of regular 10-digit numbers by genuine entities for making service/transactional calls. This also gave opportunity to fraudsters to deceive consumers using 10-digit numbers," the DoT added.

To help users distinguish between spam calls originating from 10-digit unknown numbers and the genuine service and transactional calls, the '160' series has been allocated specifically for service and transactional calls.

"For example, the service/transactional calls originating from financial entities like by RBI, SEBI, PFRDA, IRDA, etc., shall start from 1601," the government explained.

The duty to ensure the 160 series numbers are allocated correctly and with verification falls on telecom service providers.

The DoT has taken several steps to ease the pain of spam, telemarketing and cybercrime via voice calls. In March, the Department of Telecommunications launched the Digital Intelligence Platform and Chakshu.

Chakshu can be used by citizens to report suspected fraudulent communication, wherein users can report numbers, messages and phishing attempts. On the other hand, the Digital Intelligence Platform is an inter-agency effort to enable the sharing of cybercriminal data between banks, social media platforms and wallet operators, among other stakeholders.