Government blocks 1.4 lakh mobile numbers in financial fraud crackdown

According to an official release, around 140,000 mobile handsets either associated with disconnected connections or involved in cyber-crime/financial fraud have been blocked.

New Delhi: The government said that it blocked about 1.4 lakh mobile numbers so far that were involved in cyber-crime or financial frauds.

Financial Services Secretary Vivek Joshi chaired a meeting on cyber security in the financial services sector, in which various topics were covered, including integrating banks and financial institutions into the Citizen Financial Cyber Fraud Reporting and Management System (CFCFRMS) platform through API integration.

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“About 1.40 lakh mobile handsets either linked to the disconnected mobile connections or misused in cyber-crime /financial frauds have been blocked,” according to an official release.

“DoT (Department of Telecom) analysed 35 lakh Principal Entities sending bulk SMSs. Out of these, 19,776 Principal Entities involved in sending malicious SMSs blacklisted and 30,700 SMS Headers and 1,95,766 SMS templates have been disconnected,” it added.

The meeting took stock of the action points which emerged during the discussion in the last meeting held in November last year and reviewed the preparedness of the banks and other financial institutions in tackling the challenges arising from cyber security in the financial services sector, increasing trend of digital payment frauds, and readiness of all the concerned stakeholders in this regard.

During the discussion, it was noted that DoT has developed ASTR, an AI-machine learning-based engine, to detect mobile connections taken on fake/ forged documents.

One of the issues discussed in the meeting includes — banks and financial institutions are required to phase out the use of regular 10-digit numbers and use specific number series such as ‘140xxx’ for commercial/ promotional activities as prescribed by TRAI.