Government Blocks 140,000 Mobile Numbers Associated with Financial Frauds

In a meeting chaired by Financial Services secretary, Vivek Joshi, it was announced that the Government has taken action against 1.4 lakh involved in Cyber Crime with the aim to reduce digital frauds. 

This initiative has been announced with the aim to crub the increasing digital frauds. 

Since April 2023, more than 500 arrests have been made and 3.08 lakh sims have been blocked. Moreover, around 50,000 IMEI have been blocked with 592 fake links and 219 URLs have been blocked till date. 

The department of Telecommunications (DOT)  recognized around 35lakh Principal Entities (PE) sending SMS’s.

The government officials mentioned that, “out of these, more than 19.776 PE sending fraud SMS are blacklisted and 30,700 headers and 1,95,776 SMS templates have been disconnected.”

Moreover, it was announced that DOTs has developed ASTR. It is an AI learning based machine to detect mobile connections taken om fake documents. Additionally, banks and financial institutions have also been informed to conduct customer awareness in regional languages regarding digital fraud and precautions to be taken for the same. 

Moreover, ReservedBank Of India (RBI) has also issued Do’s and Don’ts while issuing/updating KYC. 

The meeting also addressed the point from the previous session held in November and reviewed the readiness of banks and financial institutions in challenges related to Cyber security.