In an official statement on Sunday, the government ordered telecom operators to block all incoming spoofed international calls containing Indian mobile numbers.
According to the Department of Telecommunications (DoT), fraudsters were making phony international calls by displaying Indian mobile numbers to Indian nationals and were also committing cybercrime and financial fraud.
Such calls appeared to originate from India but were made by cyber criminals from abroad through Caller Identity (CLI) manipulation. They have been misused in recent cases of false digital arrests, “FedEx scams,” drugs or narcotics in courier packages. , impersonation of government and police officials, disconnection of mobile numbers by DoT or Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) officials, etc.
“DoT service providers and telecom service providers (TSPs) have developed a system to identify and block such spoofed international calls from reaching any Indian telecom subscriber. Telecom service providers have now been instructed to block such incoming spoofed international calls,” the statement read.
As per the directions issued by DoT, incoming phony international calls to Indian landline numbers were already blocked by TSPs.
“Despite our best efforts, there may still be fraudsters who succeed through other means. In case of such calls, anyone can lend a hand by reporting suspected fraud alerts to the Chakshu branch on Sanchar Saathi,” the statement read.
Last week, the DoT issued guidelines to telecom operators to immediately re-verify within 60 days 6.8 lakh mobile numbers suspected to have been obtained using invalid, non-existent or phony documents. After advanced AI-based analysis, the department has flagged around 6.80 lakh mobile calls as potentially fraudulent.
