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- Forbidden Frood: operators will be obliged to block calls from abroad from fake city numbers
Forbidden Frood: operators will be obliged to block calls from abroad from fake city numbers
Operators will be obliged to automatically block calls from abroad from fake landline numbers. Now every tenth call from abroad from a supposedly Russian landline number turns out to be fraudulent. Now attackers will be deprived of the opportunity to masquerade as government agencies and large companies. The Ministry of Communications has prepared amendments to the law "On Communications".
What calls will have to block operators
Telecom operators will be obliged to automatically block calls from abroad from fake allegedly Russian landline numbers. This follows from the amendments to the law "On Communications", developed by the Ministry of Communications ("Izvestia" has familiarized itself with them). Also, the call will be interrupted "if there is no information about the subscriber number or unique identification code of the subscriber who initiated the connection." The amendments are part of an extensive package of changes to various legislative acts aimed at combating fraud, according to the accompanying materials to the document. Now this package is being coordinated with specialized agencies.
Thus, fraudsters calling from abroad will have no opportunity to communicate with their victims using fake city numbers (in Moscow, for example, they begin with the codes 495 and 499), a specialist in inter-operator interaction explained to Izvestia. As a rule, such numbers are used by government organizations, banks and large companies, which causes subscribers to trust them more than mobile numbers, and especially numbers with unfamiliar codes of foreign countries, the Izvestia interlocutor said.
According to him, it is not difficult to forge a number when calling from a foreign telephone network or via the Internet: it is enough to enter any Russian number in a special computer program, which will be detected by the subscriber.
Calls from fake direct numbers (so-called ABCs) are indeed used by fraudsters to simulate calls from state organizations and large companies, agrees Igor Bederov, Director of the Investigations Department of T.Hunter Igor Bederov. Domestically, this problem has been practically solved - thanks to stricter regulation and the introduction of anti-fraud systems by Russian companies: that's why the calls of attackers are now flowing to messengers. But Russian legislation is not relevant for foreign fraudsters and operators, so a measure of legislative regulation is needed, he said.
The spoofed traffic, coming ostensibly from landline numbers, accounts for 8-10% of the total volume of fraudulent phone calls, the expert believes.
With the development of IP technology and numerous messengers, voice communication is not only not dead, but has sharply increased in volume - and not only in minutes, but also in money, said Comnews Research partner Leonid Konik. Thus, the research company Research Nester has calculated that in 2024 the volume of the global wholesale market of voice traffic was $44.4 billion, and in 2025 this figure will increase to $50.2 billion. In the next 10 years, the organization predicts the average annual growth rate of this market at the level of 13.2%, the expert added.
- The most important component of this business is the tariff for landing (termination) of international traffic in the country where the subscriber is located. There are dozens of companies operating in the world, which by various tricks minimize the costs of traffic termination in various countries (primarily in cellular networks, as the most massive) and offer this service to telecom operators. Some of such wholesale intermediaries openly indicate that their rates for traffic landing in mobile networks of this or that country are lower than the official tariff of cellular operators in these countries (it is called MTR - Mobile Termination Rate), - Leonid Konik told Izvestia.
Among the ways to minimize the cost of international voice traffic delivery is number substitution. For example, a phone call is made from the Netherlands to Russia, but on the Dutch side the traditional "voice" is converted into IP, and the caller's number is changed to the Russian one with the help of Internet software technologies, Leonid Konik says.
- There is another scheme: there are small operators in the Russian Federation who specialize in receiving voice calls from abroad. They offer foreign operators and wholesale intermediaries a low tariff, receive voice traffic and, having passed it through their equipment, turn it into an intra-Russian one and send it to the network of a large operator in Russia in this form, with a substituted Russian number," he says.
How fake license plates are now being fought against
Despite the fact that the amendments to the law have not yet been adopted, operators have already started blocking fake calls from abroad, allegedly originating from city numbers.
- We do not conduct an incoming call from an international network if it has a Russian fixed-line numbering (for example, 7495) or an empty number," said Daria Kolesnikova, a representative of Tele2. - These measures increase the security of our subscribers, as they block obviously illegitimate calls.
- Protection from fraudulent calls is ensured by the operator's statutory obligation to check every call with a Russian number, including those coming from abroad, through the Antifrod information system and block calls with a substitute number," said Sergei Khrenov, Director of the Fraud Prevention and Revenue Loss Prevention Department at MegaFon.
The issue of blocking spoofed calls from abroad from fraudulent mobile numbers is more regulatively elaborated, which is not the case with landline numbers, so it is logical to enshrine in the law a norm preventing calls from fake city numbers, says a source in one of the companies. The current version of the law "On Communications" refers only to mobile radio telephony numbers, but operators are already successfully blocking them, he says.
The proposed amendments clarify and concretize the existing norms, MTS believes. The purpose of their adoption is further harmonization of legislation on countering fraud and preventing fraudulent actions in operators' networks, the company believes.
The Izvestia Ministry noted that the norm obliging to block incoming calls from abroad has been in effect since 2021. Such calls may not have a number or use a Russian one to mislead the subscriber for fraudulent purposes, the agency points out.
- This is not the only measure of Mincifra aimed at combating fraudsters. Together with the industry and other agencies, we are working on a set of measures to reduce and prevent cyber fraud. It is still premature to talk about the details," the ministry added.
The Russian authorities are trying to fight such schemes of passing traffic from abroad, Leonid Konik notes. In July 2021, a clause was introduced into the law "On Communications", which obliges an operator in Russia to block an incoming call or SMS from abroad, if it is accompanied by a Russian phone number (except when the traffic comes from a Russian in roaming).
- But the receiving operator cannot always recognize that the call is coming from a foreign country. Probably, in order to effectively block incoming calls from abroad with spoofed numbers, the legislator decided to expand the scope of this paragraph of the law "On Communications": now he proposes to block in any case when the receiving operator does not have accurate data about the subscriber-initiator of the call (about his number for traditional calls or IP-address when using IP-telephony), - says Leonid Konik.
This measure will definitely weed out many calls from swapped numbers, the expert concluded.
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