MOSCOW, 26 Apr. The number of fraudulent calls that go to mobile phones in Russia has decreased several times, while about 70-80% of such calls in the country now occur through WhatsApp, said Maksut Shadayev, head of the Russian Ministry of Digital Development.
“I believe that over this year, together with the operators, we have made a very big progress, as we see it. We see that the number of calls that go to the mobile phone has decreased several times … All this is having a great effect. And now we clearly see that 70-80% of fraudulent calls are made not from regular numbering, but from WhatsApp. In this sense, we will continue this work,» Shadayev said during the conference «Telecom: transformation of business models and search for new solutions» organized by the Vedomosti newspaper.
According to the minister, there is already all the regulation in the field of combating the substitution of numbers. «As far as I know, 200 administrative cases have been initiated against operators who transmit traffic from surrogate numbers. The work is in progress, we see the result,» Shadayev said.
The agency also agreed with operators on a specific design to combat spam calls. «Here, too, we believe that this year there will be significant progress. Spam calls, not fraudulent, but if someone calls with advertising. We will also regulate them, and there will be an order of magnitude fewer such calls,» the minister added.
At the end of December, Roskomnadzor launched the first stage of the Antifraud system, which allows to strengthen control over telephone calls and identify spoof numbers. In the middle of the RKN reported that the system prevented 135 million fraudulent calls.
«Anti-fraud» works as follows: telecom operators connect to the system, when a call is received, the operator automatically requests data from the system that the subscriber has made a call, and if the call is real and the number has not been changed, then a verified connection is established, clarifies the department.