The new regulation against telephone scams through identity impersonation includes fines of up to two million euros to operators that do not meet their new obligations. These will gradually enter into force after the publication of the order signed on Wednesday by the Minister for Digital Transformation and Public Function, Óscar López.
The sanctioning regime applicable to the operators will be that of a “serious” infraction of the General Telecommunications Law, with fines of up to two million. “The graduation of the sanction in each case will depend on the existence of mitigating, aggravating or the impact caused,” explained the general secretary of Telecommunications and Digital Infrastructures and digital security, Matías González Martín, in a meeting with the press.
Once the ministerial order signed by López is published in the next few days in the Official State Gazette (BOE), one of the first measures that will enter into force, at 20 days of being published, it will be the obligation of the blocking operators Calls and SMS with numbering that has not been attributed assigned or awarded in the National Numbering Plan, that is, numbers “With no one behind.”
In addition, as Minister López already announced, companies will have “strictly prohibited” to make commercial calls with a mobile phone, since this numbering is conceived to identify end users and not companies. This measure will apply to 3 months after the entry into force of the Ministerial Order.
The new regulations allow in general that companies can make commercial calls with numbers 800 and 900, which so far have identified free calls for the client. In addition to these numbers, companies can also use national numbers with geographical prefixes (91 in the case of the Community of Madrid).
The operators will also have a period of three months to adapt to the obligation to block calls and SMS with international origin but in whose original numbering field there is a national number: calls that theoretically originate in Uganda, France or England, but they arrive as if They were originated by a Spanish number, and that they are “another indication that the identity of a client is being manipulated,” explained the Secretary of Telecommunications. The exception here are the subscribers that are abroad and use the so -called Roaming.
The new regulations establishes the creation of a registry managed by the National Commission of Markets and Competition (CNMC) in which the alphanumeric SMS codes that refer organizations or companies (Correos, the Tax Agency, Renfe, Financial Entities … ).
So far the control of these labels fell to the operators. To avoid these frauds, the regulator is assumed. Given its complexity and that is an additional task to the broad scope of CNMC competences, it is the measure with a longer implementation period of 15 months.
No control of WhatsApp
The Plan does not include obligations referring to communications by WhatsApp, which is an increasingly used route by companies of customer customer service, but is also used by many scammers that are passed, for example by relatives of the affected party in Hurry. In the coming months “we will have to see the impacts of this order,” said the Secretary of Telecommunications.
The measurement package does affect the call centers located abroad, which use a kind of international catwalk but end up connected to a network termination point in Spain, and will present the national numbering corresponding to that point, which will control The ‘Telecos’ operators.
The plan was taken to a previous public consultation a year ago and in June of last year a draft was taken to a draft that the text finally approved keeps “95%”, with some technical improvements “secondary order”. For example, the proposal of the blocks to block calls in which the calling number is not identified has been included.
Exponential growth
The Ministry has found that telephone scams have grown “exponentially” in recent years. When Digital Transformation began preparing the plan a year ago, police reports warned of an increase in these practices of “more than 500% in 8-10 years” which, according to the Secretary of Telecommunications, has surely already fallen short.
These frauds, he recalled, causes “important financial and economic damages to citizens, to consumers of telecommunications services to which distrust”, and public and private organizations whose identity is supplanted.
From digital transformation, they stress that similar measures have recently been adopted, “although not as complete” as in Spain, in countries such as Finland, Germany and Belgium, with “very positive” results, which have resulted in the elimination of “until 90 %”Of telephone scams.
The ministerial order is the result of a work that has been “negotiating, agreeing”, with the operators, for which “almost any rule or obligation is a cost of adaptation”, but that “are interested” in this process “because They suffer in a very remarkable way the damage of these scams and have other costs for not avoiding them. ”
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