Trai tightens anti-spam rules, brings AI-based detection under framework

Telecom regulator Trai on Friday tightened its framework to curb Unsolicited Commercial Communications (UCC), incorporating artificial intelligence-based detection of suspected spam into its regulations and introducing consumer appeal mechanism.

Under the amended regulations, telecom service providers will identify numbers with a high probability of being used for sending spam and share the information among themselves.

Where five or more numbers associated with a sender are flagged within 10 days, further investigation and graded action will follow, including KYC re-verification, physical verification, barring of outgoing services and disconnection in cases of repeated violations.

Trai has also defined Application-to-Person or A2P calls as calls initiated by an application, software system or automated platform without direct human dialling, including autodialling, robocalls and pre-recorded or artificial voice technologies.

Entities using A2P calls will have to pre-declare their use and the numbers being used to their telecom service provider, while calls made without such declaration will be treated as UCC. A termination charge of up to 5 paise per minute has also been introduced for A2P calls, with specified exemptions.

"A2P calls made through any numbering series designated by authority for regulated commercial calls, and authority-authorised calls are exempted from termination charges," Trai (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) said.

The amendments also strengthen complaint-based action.

Trai has also strengthened safeguards against misuse of headers and content templates and prohibited call-management applications from blanket blocking, filtering or spam-tagging calls from designated 140xx, 1600xx and 1601xx series.