Government suspends two telemarketing companies for sending 5.5 million fraudulent SMS

Amid rising SMS fraud cases in the country, the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has suspended the operations of two telemarketing companies, namely V-con Intelligent Security and OneXtel Media, reports Economic Times. In its July 15 order, the Department of Telecommunications said the two had misused their platform to send malicious and phishing SMS, the report said.

“In order to protect citizens from cybercrime/financial fraud, all TSPs (telecommunication service providers) are directed to immediately block these two RTMs (registered telemarketing providers)… (and) file police reports against them for misusing the DLT platform to send malicious SMS and phishing SMS,” the DoT’s directive said.

The duo has sent over 5 million fraudulent SMS messages since January 2024, the DoT claims
V-con – a part of the Videocon Group – and OneXtel Media have been held responsible for sending 55.5 million fraudulent SMS messages to smartphone users since January 2024. The DoT took this action after receiving several complaints from telecom users on the Chakshu portal about malicious SMS messages.

Citing officials involved in the investigation, the ET report said the DoT ordered the blacklisting of 131 principal entities (PEs), 5,000 SMS content templates and 700 SMS headers. However, the scammers have come up with new headers to bypass the blockchain-based SMS filtering system.

The ET report said it also found that one of these two companies – V-con and OneXtel – had received money from bank accounts involved in several complaints of organised cross-border crime, including illegal stock investment fraud.

What do the companies say about this?
According to the report, OneXtel has strongly opposed the government’s suspension on the grounds that the company was not given an opportunity to present its stand. Abrar Chunawala, CEO of OneXtel Media, said, “We are aware of the ministry’s order but we are also surprised at how the government is putting the onus on a reputed telemarketing company like us, which has been operating for the last nine years. It must be stressed that we were never informed about the authority’s action, no notice of request for comment was served.”

“The approximate figure of 55.5 million mentioned in the order is probably for 6 months and belongs to two companies. Let’s say 17 million of them were through Onextel. This is only 0.06% of our total traffic. Is it then fair to suddenly put a company out of business because of such a small percentage? As per the order, it is the responsibility of the telecom companies to operate the DLT system. Aren’t they at fault along with their DLT technology partners?” Chunawala added.