Fraud SMS: Amid rising cases of SMS scams in the country, the Department of Telecom (DoT) has suspended two telemarketing companies. These two companies are V-Con Intelligent Security and OneXtel Media. According to a report, in the directive issued on July 15, the Department of Telecom had said that both these companies have misused their platform to send phishing SMS.

According to DoT, "To protect citizens from cyber crime, all TSPs i.e. Telecom Service Providers are instructed to immediately suspend these two registered telemarketers. They have used the DLT platform to send phishing messages." 

Over 5 million fraudulent SMSes:

The Telecom Department claims that both of them have sent more than 5 million fraudulent SMSes since January 2024. V-Con, a unit of Videocon Group, and OneXtel Media have been found guilty of sending 55.5 million fraudulent SMSes to smartphone users since January 2024. Let us tell you that the company has taken this action in view of the reports on the Chakshu portal.

The report states that DoT has issued orders to blacklist 131 prominent entities, 5000 SMS content templates and 700 SMS headers. However, hackers are also quite clever and have created a new header to deceive the blockchain-based SMS filter system.

What do these two companies say:

According to the report, OneXtel has strongly opposed this decision of the government. They say that the company was not given any opportunity to present its side. OneXtel Media Chief Executive Officer Abrar Chunawala said, "We are aware of the instructions of the Telecom Department and are surprised that we have been working with the government for 9 years. In such a situation, the government should have issued a show cause notice first. But nothing like this was done."