Dealing With SMS Scams And Frauds
Daily Times Pakistan has reported that the telecom industry in Pakistan is trying to figure out the strategy, plan and the tools to thwart fraudulent SMS and calls. Services such as balance transfer are one of the most common target where user end up losing their balance beacuase they act on the instructions in the scam message. This problem has been around for a while and consumer have complained about the lack of clear actions against these criminals and con artists.
The problem has been hard to tackle because of 2 reasons: first, telecommunication fraud has always been difficult to control and as technology advances, it is often the bad guys who exploit it first. Second, there was no comprehensive thought plan for tackling this. PTA published a few ads in the newspapers but that was not enough, given that many cell phone users may not read papers regularly. Now all the stakeholders have come together (see the PTA notes here).
Various solutions have been proposed and considered to filter out the bad messages at the mbile network operator level. Obviously, blocking spam/fraud sms is one way to do it but there it is not always possible to distinuguish the bad sms from a good one. Just as with spam email, genuine messages could be blocked as well. Diagram below discusses another way to handle this and is taken from a paper at 3gpp site.
Additional notes from PTA-Mobile phone company meetings from Daily Times:
Cellular phone operators, in collaboration with Pakistan Telecom Authority (PTA), are mulling methods to curb fraudulent activities that incur financial loss to their customers through their networks.
It is a common practice that subscribers receive SMS messages containing information about lucky draw awards, and lose their balance if they unconsciously reply to them. Besides, some obnoxious calls from deceivers invite subscribers to come to particular location for award of prize money, resulting in loss of money to the subscribers.
Cellular phone operators have been receiving complaints on regular basis from their customers about fraud calls and SMSs that cause lose of balance on reply.
It is imperative to mention here that Mobilink had captured three big groups, which were involved in such activities. However, being an operator/service provider, Mobilink does not have the authority to punish such people. An operator can only cancel the culprit’s SIM for which there are no guidelines.
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