Jyotiraditya Scindia launches DoT system to block spoofed international calls

Union minister for communications Jyotiraditya Scindia on Tuesday launched the department of telecommunications’ “International Incoming Spoofed Calls Prevention System” that can detect and block spam international calls that display Indian numbers as the caller ID.
Multiple scammers masquerade as police, courier company employees, or others to call victims from international numbers that appear as Indian numbers on the victims’ phones.
In July, the finance ministry announced a ₹38.76 crore allocation to the DoT (department of telecommunications) to set up the Centralised International Out Roamer (CIOR), as this system was then called. The allocation for the Digital Intelligence Unit (DIU), a project whose aim is to investigate the fraudulent use of telecom resources, such as scam and spam calls and messages, was also increased from ₹50 crore (revised estimate for FY24) to ₹85 crore (budget estimate for FY25).
This system was implemented in two phases, three DoT officials told HT on the condition of anonymity. It was first implemented at telco level earlier this month and led to about 3 to 3.2 million such calls being blocked daily.
When someone with an Indian number (+91) goes outside India and takes a roaming pack, the calls they make hit the Indian TSPs’ international long distance (ILD) network. To detect whether it is indeed a call from a genuine Indian SIM or if it is someone spoofing an Indian number, in the first phase of this system, a telco, on getting a call from a +91 number issued by it on its ILD network, will check whether its genuine subscriber with that number is indeed outside India and making a call.
If the subscriber is actually outside India, Airtel will let the call through but if its data shows that the genuine subscriber is within India, the call will be dropped. However, if a telco gets a call from a +91 number issued by another company on its ILD network, it cannot run this check since two telcos cannot share subscriber data with each other for both legal and proprietary reasons.
This is where the second phase, which was launched on Monday, comes in.
In the second phase, the DIU of DoT and the TSPs built an integrated system so that a centralised database can be used to check for genuine subscribers.
The integrated system commenced operations on October 17 and within 24 hours of being in operation, it identified and blocked 13.5 million incoming international calls with Indian phone numbers as spoofed calls. Daily, India receives about 15 million calls that hit the telcos’ ILD network and display a +91 number on the caller ID. This means, the spoofed calls (where the call originates from a non-Indian number but is displayed as an Indian number) account for about 90% of international calls that display +91.
Separately, the DoT linked 300,000 Indian SIMs with cybercrimes being carried out from Southeast Asia and flagged them for re-verification, two of the officials cited above said. This means that genuine Indian SIMs were being taken to SE Asian countries such as Cambodia to scam people within India through modus operandi such as scaring them with digital arrests, fake information about packages being stopped by the customs department, among others.
Of these, 295,000 SIMs were blocked for failing re-verification and DoT shared details of the points of sale of these SIMs with the state police units and the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) for further action. Many of these SIMs were sold in Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Punjab, one of the officials said.