Airtel expands alert coverage to int'l calls, SMS to combat fraud calls

Bharti Airtel on Monday announced two new features in its ongoing offensive against spam, as it expanded detection coverage to international calls and SMSes and introduced spam alert display in ten Indian languages.

Airtel said it expects to nullify the growing and alarming trend of spam calls originating and being funnelled through international networks into India by fraudsters amid a 12 per cent rise in such attempts in the last six months.

"Following the launch of its AI-powered spam detection tool that flagged over 27.5 billion calls as spam to its customers, Airtel today announced the introduction of two significant enhancements aimed at staying ahead of spammers," the company said in a release.

Customers will now receive spam alerts for calls and SMS messages in their preferred Indian languages.

"This new feature will be available in nine vernacular languages, with plans to add more in the future," the release noted.

Further, Airtel's AI-powered tool will now screen and alert customers to all spam calls and SMSes originating from international networks.

"Once Airtel intensified its efforts to combat domestic spam calls, scamsters and spammers resorted to exploiting foreign networks to funnel fraudulent calls into India. This alarming trend resulted in a 12 per cent increase in overseas spam calls in the last six months," the company said.

Airtel expects to nullify this growing challenge with its new feature.

Siddharth Sharma, Director Marketing and CEO Connected Homes, Bharti Airtel, said: "Customers and their feedback are at the heart of everything we do. After carefully analysing customer feedback, we have enhanced our solutions to better serve the linguistic diversity of India".

Additionally, with the growing volume of spam traffic shifting to foreign networks, the company has decided to expand its AI-powered tool to scan all SMS messages and phone calls originating from international numbers, Sharma said.

The upgraded AI-driven spam solution will now notify users about calls and messages from domestic and international numbers in ten Indian languages, including Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Gujarati, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Urdu, Punjabi and Telugu.

"Spam alert notifications using vernacular languages are only accessible to customers using Android devices. All these features continue to be free for customers and will get auto-activated for all Airtel customers without them having to raise a service request," the company said.