CHENNAI: Tamil Nadu police’s cyber crime wing on Friday announced that it will be working with the Department of Telecom (DoT) to block spoofed/spam calls which are used to commit crimes in the state.
A meeting was held at the wing’s headquarters in Ashok Nagar in Chennai on Thursday which was chaired by Sandeep Mittal, Additional Director General of Police, Cyber Crime Wing. Officers of DoT and all telecom service providers (TSPs) such as Jio, BSNL, Airtel and Vodafone were present.
The DoT, in partnership with all TSPs, has launched the centralised international out roamer system which is an advanced tool aimed at protecting telecom subscribers from fraudulent international spoofed calls.
The system tries to targets spoofed calls that appear to come from Indian numbers but are actually initiated by cyber criminals abroad. Its goal is to stop these calls before they reach unsuspecting subscribers.
The meeting discussed facilities available for identifying and blocking spoofed calls with Sudhakar, ITS, Deputy Director General (Telecom).
Various possibilities and shortcomings on the new feature of blocking incoming spoofed calls were also discussed and suggestions were made to improve the existing system.
As most of the spam calls are through VOIPs calls, the possibility of extending the facility of blocking the spoofed calls through WhatsApp, Skype etc were discussed.
It was decided that the cyber crime wing will collect data from TSPs and DoT on spam calls that have landed to reduce their incidence and curtail the scams. From January to September this year, a total of 4,430 spoofed calls have been reported.