Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has resumed the process of SMS scrubbing after having suspended the SMS scrubbing rules for a week following massive disruptions in online transactions. That said, TRAI has directed the telecom operators to ensure that online transactions are not affected due to failure in delivering SMSes and OTPs.
Further, TRAI has directed the telcos to create daily reports on the percentage of SMS traffic that failed in the scrubbing process. The regulator has notified that there will be review of the whole process again on March 23, 2021.
Earlier in July 2018, the Telecom Commercial Communication Customer Preference Regulations, were introduced to effectively deal with the nuisance of spam, and prohibit unregistered entities from sending commercial messages. As per the terms of the rules, registered firms are also prevented from sending fraudulent messages to customers.
The rules mandate telecom operators to verify the content of every SMS with the registered text before delivering it to consumers. To this end, telcos have to implement a distributed ledger technology, where all enterprises which send messages to customers (including critical SMSes, such as OTPs sent by banks, communication messages and promotional messages) have to register their entity, the SMS header and the content template.
If there is even a slight mismatch in the content, the message will not be delivered.
However, for the time being, TRAI has allowed messages to reach customers irrespective of whether the content template is registered, or the content ID is present, or if there is a mismatch in the template registered and the messages offered for delivery.
That said, TRAI has asked entities and telemarketers to ensure compliance to the prescribed procedures while submitting bulk messages to the telcos.
Commenting on the development, Lt. Gen. Dr. SP Kochhar, DG COAI, said, “As per the revised directive from TRAI to resume the scrubbing, in case of failure of the messages due to any reasons including content id, mismatch of template etc. same may be recorded. However, the message may be allowed to be delivered to the recipient. Thus, no messages will be getting blocked.”
