UTM shut down number doubles in 2022

As many as 32,032 unregistered telemarketers (UTM) were shut down in 2022 after complaints of spam, more than double the 15,382 UTM closed in 2021, data submitted by the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) to Lok Sabha on Wednesday, showed.

The Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) classifies any sender of commercial communication who is not officially registered as a telemarketing with Access Providers such as Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel, Vodafone Idea, and BSNL, as UTMs. After receiving multiple spam complaints, access providers are bound by law to shut down UTMs based on TRAI guidelines on Unsolicited Commercial Communications (UCC) including spam.

The Telecom Commercial Communication Customers Preference Regulation, 2018 (TCCCPR-2018) mandates that on the third instance of violation, telemarketing connections will be disconnected for a period of up to two years and blacklisted.

In a testimony to the spiraling problem of spam calls and messages, TRAI received 904,000 separate complaints against UTMs, up from 855,000 complaints in 2021. Official data showed the problem has intensified after the Covid pandemic since there were only 302,000 complaints in 2020.

Access Providers are required to act against UTMs by giving a warning, putting them under Usage Cap, or disconnecting services for repeat violations. Usage Cap means a limit put on a telephone number for making a maximum of twenty outgoing voice calls per day and a maximum of twenty outgoing messages per day.

In 2022, access providers also put usage limits on 77,213 telemarketers, limiting their ability to make calls to just 20 per day. As compared to this, 54,865 and 15,112 telemarketers had usage limits put on them in 2021 and 2020, respectively.

System in place
Telemarketing entities have to register on distributed ledger technology (DLT) platforms run by access providers. These platforms are digital systems for keeping and managing the record of sender IDs and templates, and businesses can get access to exclusive headers and message templates — keywords denoting a business or brand that pops up when a phone user receives a message.

The problem often starts when these businesses, legally classified as principal entities, purchase bulk short messaging service (SMS) from a telemarketer to send SMSs to clients and customers.

Earlier this year, TRAI had cracked down on telemarketing firms that spam message inboxes and asked TSPs to scrub their DLT platforms clean and block all unverified telemarketer accounts. Business Standard