Trai tightens anti-spam rules, brings AI-based detection under framework

Telecom regulator TRAI on Friday tightened its framework to curb Unsolicited Commercial Communications (UCC), incorporating artificial intelligence-based detection of suspected spam into its regulations and introducing consumer appeal mechanism.

Under the amended regulations, telecom service providers will identify numbers with a high probability of being used for sending spam and share the information among themselves.

Where five or more numbers associated with a sender are flagged within 10 days, further investigation and graded action will follow, including KYC re-verification, physical verification, barring of outgoing services and disconnection in cases of repeated violations.

TRAI has also defined Application-to-Person or A2P calls as calls initiated by an application, software system or automated platform without direct human dialling, including autodialling, robocalls and pre-recorded or artificial voice technologies.

Entities using A2P calls will have to pre-declare their