Mobile carriers need to be more aggressive

A few months ago, Ms. HTKL (HCMC) received a call from the phone number 0947xxxxxx claiming to be from "Da Kao Ward Police, District 1" informing her that her level 2 electronic identification was incorrect and could not be uploaded online. Gullible, she agreed to have it resolved.

Seeing that the "fish took the bait", the scammers led the victim through many stages with many different people and police agencies, and then 3 days later, they stole from her bank account 3 times, a total of nearly 1.5 billion VND.

To deal with the situation of spam calls that annoy and even scam users, the Ministry of Information and Communications has issued a document requiring network operators to take responsibility in the long-standing fight against junk SIMs. SIMs that are operating according to regulations are all linked to specific owners and are authenticated, and subscriber information is synchronized with the national database. In fact, junk SIMs are still rampant, with calls and bad messages continuing to appear, impersonating, threatening, and scamming mobile phone users. These criminals have challenged and defied by "daring" to use subscriber numbers of major network operators. From junk SIMs, they have now become junk calls, continuing to haunt the public and harm society. Is this the consequence of half-hearted handling, not going far enough, and not even enough to deter?

In recent times, the authorities have taken another measure in the fight against this type of crime: identifying calls and messages. First of all, identifying phone numbers of state agencies (especially law enforcement agencies, etc.); organizations and services that have extensive relations with the public (such as banks, etc.) When contacting people, these phone numbers will clearly display the name of the agency. Careful people will be able to distinguish which calls are legitimate.

Therefore, while continuing to make efforts to combat spam SIMs and strictly manage each subscriber number, the authorities need to promote continuous and regular communication to raise public awareness of how to identify and proactively protect themselves. Notifications to the public are also only updated by the authorities through official communication channels, including official accounts on social networks.

When receiving reports of impersonating or fraudulent phone numbers, the authorities need to quickly verify, process and respond to the informant, and post them on official information channels to notify and deter. In addition, mobile network operators need to take strong action to immediately block (for a period of time at first) the violating subscriber numbers.

Source: https://nld.com.vn/nha-mang-di-dong-can-manh-tay-hon-196240528212137041.htm