International Regulatory Approaches - The Australian Government to Require SMS/MMS Sender ID Registraion

Comparisons of telecom fraud regulations across countries including India's DLT-based sender registration, France's ARCEP marking faked numbers as hidden callers, Singapore's 'Likely Scam' labeling, and the EU's handling of VoIP caller IDs.

Global regulators are increasingly aggressive in labeling suspicious communications, with France marking faked numbers as "hidden" and Singapore tagging unregistered senders with "Likely Scam" warnings. India has pioneered a sophisticated approach using Distributed Ledger Technology to mandate the pre-registration of message templates and sender categories, though some observers note these measures are more effective against fraud than general spam. However, these security protocols create a friction point for legitimate users, as the push to anonymize or block international VoIP traffic can disrupt valid services like call forwarding and roaming. This tension highlights the ongoing struggle to balance consumer protection with the technical flexibility that modern telecommunications require.

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> I've yet to read a good explanation of why the telcos permit CLID faking and reinjection of apparently local CLID by overseas inputs.

Actually, there are several legitimate use cases:

• Call divert: Local number calls a number abroad and that one is diverted back a another local number. It's probably rare, but it's a totally legit use case.

• 2G/3G roaming: I'm not an expert on this one, but as far as I understood it, roaming calls placed on 2G/3G networks are initiated in the visiting country, and use the local number of the caller.

• Getting better rates using VoIP. Whether this is legit or not might be subject to discussion, however I was using a foreign VoIP provider (because they had better rates for local calls than any local providers, for my low call volume) sending out my own local number (had to be validated by them by callback, although that's their own security measure, not the network's one). Now in several EU countries and Switzerland this doesn't work any more, as calls bearing national IDs coming from abroad must be displayed as anonymous. And it's quite annoying that there isn't a way to "authentify" those numbers so the owner can use them as they wish.

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> Even just flagging it would help.

That's what's mandated by ARCEP (the French regulator) since the beginning of this year, and now all faked numbers are marked as “hidden caller”, and indeed it helps a lot.

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In India this has been the regulation for several years, and has helped along with the Do Not Disturb (DND) registration by the end user and rules for senders/callers. Anyone sending bulk SMSes, even if the sending is done through a third party provider like AWS from another country/region, will have to register. [1]

The entity, the header, content template (which allows two or three variables/placeholders) need to be registered. A Distributed Ledger (DLT) is used to store these. Ad hoc messages without a registered template are expected to be rejected by the telco.

[1]: https://trai.gov.in/advice-to-senders

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Singapore does this. Any message that comes from an unregistered sender show up on the phone with “Likely Scam” as the sender name.

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I don’t think this will cut down on spam so much as fraud.
All spam calls I get don’t have registered IDs

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India has something similar, and even goes a step further by having last alphabet as an identifier for Promotional, Services, Govt. etc.

https://www.trai.gov.in/advice-to-senders