New regulations on bulk SMS won’t lead to delayed OTPs, says TRAI

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) on Thursday (November 28, 2024) said that new regulations on bulk SMS messages would not lead to delayed deliveries of one-time passcodes (OTPs). The Authority was responding to a viral video and subsequent news articles where an individual claims that all SMS messages will be “verified” before being delivered.

The claim appears to be a misrepresentation of an August 20, 2024 direction issued to telecom providers under the Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference Regulations, 2018. Those directions tightened an earlier requirement that bulk SMS senders — including those who send OTPs — must register the format of all messages, which are sent in huge volumes.

Under the August 2024 directions, TRAI mandated that in addition to registering the format of SMS messages, telcos would now have to make sure that there was a “chain record” linking each message not only to the “originating access provider”, that is, the bulk SMS gateway, but also the entities who register the message.

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This tightening of regulations was part of a range of regulations and orders passed by the Department of Telecommunications and TRAI in response to the noticeable uptick in calling and SMS spam this year. The August 20, 2024 directions are currently slated to come into force on November 30, 2024, after multiple extensions granted to telecom operators, who said that implementing these changes would take some time.