A NEW crackdown is being launched in the war on scam texts in Ireland.
Businesses unregistered with the telecoms regulator will see their mass-texts to customers slapped with “scam likely” warnings from next month in a bid to crack down on phone fraudsters.
More than 7,000 businesses and organisations that send en-masse messages have pre-registered with the The Commission for Communications Regulation, Comreg.
But SMS messages from unregistered companies will be labelled “scam likely”, while scam messages will be blocked completely by October.
Comreg’s SMS Sender ID registry is for use by businesses like Amazon or An Post so that they can attach a name and mobile number.
But scammers can easily fake this Sender ID with the current system, leading to thousands of Irish people receiving texts that appear to be from legitimate businesses.
The new system is designed to cut out these fake IDs so that Irish consumers won’t be bombarded with scam texts.
Comreg have said that mobile network providers will have the final say in what gets blocked as they will have access to the Sender ID registry.
And they advised businesses that haven’t registered to do so now to avoid their mass messages being labelled scam, a process which will come into effect from July 3.
The move comes after ComReg found that there are 365,000 cases a year involving scam calls or texts.
And more than 89million people cite “annoying or irritating” communications because of it.
They also estimate that 5,000 businesses per year are the victim of call-and-text related fraud. The average cost of scam texts each year is €115million while calls are €300million.
ComReg chairperson Garrett Blaney said: “ComReg is actively engaging with mobile service providers, SMS Aggregators and organisations using SMS Sender IDs to ensure that as many legitimate SMS Sender IDs as possible are registered before the ‘likely scam’ modification phase begins.”
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