Consumer Protection Tracker
Protection Against Nuisance Calls and Texts benchmark updated to include India, Malta, Sweden and South Korea
We recently expanded the Protection Against Nuisance Calls and Texts benchmark in our Consumer Protection Tracker to include four new countries – India, Malta, Sweden and South Korea. Over the past year, regulators in each of these countries introduced new measures to address the growing scale of nuisance calls and texts, with particular concern for the negative impacts of scams and fraud on consumers. In South Korea, new standards for detecting malicious SMS messages (sometimes referred to as smishing messages) were announced alongside the debut of an AI-powered voice recognition system to identify and track scam callers. Regulators in Malta, India and Sweden all implemented rules to require operators to block incoming international calls that use a domestic presentation number, a practice referred to as spoofing.
Of the 31 countries we track, 21 countries have adopted regulation to address invalid calling line identification (CLI) in order to target likely malicious calls. A number of those countries, including Australia, Belgium, Finland, Ireland, Singapore and the UK, have specifically adopted rules to require operators to block incoming international calls that spoof a domestic CLI. Some regulators, including those in Germany and Hong Kong, have required operators to modify presentation numbers if CLI is unverified. A further two countries – Japan and Poland – have supported voluntary approaches to blocking calls with spoofed numbers in cooperation with major operators. With one additional country (Mexico) considering the adoption of similar rules to outlaw spoofed domestic numbers, it appears that a global consensus is continuing to form around a new regulatory tactic to fight scams.
