The Trai and its chief Dr JS Sarma have tried tackling it, but they need
help. The Trai may have the intent, but it does not have the teeth to back it
up. The NDNC (National Do Not Call registry) is mostly useless. I'm subscribed
onto the NDNC ever since it started...and I get a flood of spam.
Dr Sarma has been mooting the NDCR (Do Call Registry) for some time, but that
is not the solution. The problem is not do-call vs do-not-call. The problem is
lack of enforcement.
Did you know that the NDNC is a major, validated, source of mobile numbers
for SMS spammers? Here's how to do it-just create a database of serial numbers,
like 98100-00000, 00001, etc, and run it past the NDNC. The NDNC will reject
those numbers that are registered with it, and, voila! you know exactly which
numbers are valid, and, moreover, are probably high net worth users who take
their privacy seriously. Now you can sell that delightfully clean, validated,
database at a premium to spammers.
I guess you know that mass SMS must carry a label, such as TD-UNICON, which
identifies the operator and the sender. The first two letters are the operator
and the city. TD is Tata Delhi, TM is Tata Mumbai, AD is Airtel Delhi, and so
on.
Here's some quick data from my phone's messages of the past four weeks: 165
spam messages, of which seventy-five are Tata Delhi, forty-eight Tata Mumbai,
and six Tata Ahmedabad: that's 77% of all the spam coming from Tata Indicom.
Not surprising, given that Tata Indicom is the country's leading seller of
mass SMS at the cheapest rates possible. Tata Mumbai and Tata Delhi probably add
up to over half the spam coming in on your mobile handset.
Of the 165 total SPAM messages on my (Airtel Delhi) mobile in about a month,
75 were from Tata Delhi, 48 from Tata Mumbai...here's the full list:
75 Tata Delhi (46%)
48 Tata Mumbai (28%)
14 Loop Mumbai (9%)
11 Unlabelled (number only)
09 Labels without operator prefix
06 Tata Ahmedabad (4%)
02 Reliance Mumbai
01 Airtel Delhi
This isn't a scientific survey yet: it's just a record of my phone's SMSs for
one month.
Prasanto K Roy
pkr@cybermedia.co.in
Chief editor at CyberMedia (publishers of Voice&Data) can be found at www.pkr.in
and twitter.com/prasanto
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