Communications watchdog ComReg is stepping up its battle against scammers with the launch of a text registration system.
This is aimed at making it more difficult for criminals to piggy back on legitimate operators and send convincing spam messages to consumers.
Irish people and businesses lose more than €100 million to scammers sending bogus messages each year, but the new system should stop most messages reaching consumers once it is fully implemented.
ComReg says its SMS sender ID registry will help protect consumers, services and brands by helping mobile service providers to identify and block fake SMS messages.
Application-to-person (A2P) SMS messages often include a name (SMS sender ID) to indicate who sent it. This sender ID may be the name of the organisation or public service which sent the text message, for example 234BANK.
Scammers often use text messages with fake sender IDs to mimic trusted services and brands.
This bogus text messages can be difficult to distinguish from genuine and legitimate ones, so “undermine trust in SMS and are a threat to important public and private business services as well as to consumers”, ComReg said.
The registry is a secure repository of registered SMS sender IDs and registered sender ID owners.
SMS providers will be required to check text messages from SMS sender IDs against the registered SMS sender IDs in the registry to help prevent scam texts reaching consumers.
From July 3rd unregistered sender IDs will be modified to “Likely Scam”.
The aim of this modification is to alert the recipient that the SMS may not be legitimate, and to be cautious of the content of the message.
From October 3rd SMS messages from unregistered SMS Sender IDs will be blocked.
ComReg is asking all organisations using SMS sender IDs in their SMS communications with customers, clients and service users to take action and register their sender ID now.
In support of ComReg’s initiative, more than 7,000 SMS sender IDs have already been registered by SMS providers managing A2P SMS traffic on behalf of organisations.
“Many organisations, particularly in the public sector, use text messaging as a valuable and effective tool in delivering services to the public,” Minister for Communications Patrick O’Donovan said.
“I welcome the launch of the SMS sender ID registry, which will increase confidence in the use of SMS services and help stop scam text messages from even reaching customers.”
ComReg chairman Garrett Blaney said: “The SMS sender ID registry is just one of a number of interventions introduced by ComReg to help mitigate the scourge of scam phone calls and text messages.
“Europe Economics estimates the annual level of harm to Irish consumers and businesses from scam calls and texts at over €300 million, of which approximately €115 million is attributed to scam texts.”
