Watch out for calls from 160 series; banks or govt bodies could be calling you

• Follow

The Centre is at war with pesky calls as much as it is at war with cyberfraud and in an attempt to rein in unsolicited promotional calls the telecom department has earmarked numbers beginning with 160 for transactional and service calls for commercial purposes. Thereby, it has also limited marketing calls to 140 number series.

The decision was announced by DoT on May 28.

The Economic Times has reported that according to the DoT decision, all central and state government entities would use 10-digit phone numbers telephone numbers that begin with 1600 and bear the format 1600ABCXXX. Those financial service organisations that are regulated by the Reserve Bank, Sebi, IRDAI and PFRDA shall use phone numbers in the format 1601ABCXXX for service calls.

The new 160 number series would help subscribers not to fall victim to fraudsters making calls from personal SIMs to swindle unsuspecting victims into believing that they were bonafide callers from banks.

This announcement marks another step forward from the earlier decision where the DoT said only phone numbers beginning with 140 can be used to make any commercial call. After the decision on May 28, marketing calls will be made using numbers beginning with 140 would be used for marketing and service calls would come from numbers starting with 160.

Needless to say, this bifurcation would help the common man to identify the basic nature of calls from the number appearing on the screen of his/her phone.

Significantly, Trai recently recommended telecom service providers and device manufacturers that the caller’s name and number should both be displayed and this would be applicable for both personal and business calls. The announcement of DoT appears to complement this earlier move of Trai.

The demarcation between 160 and 140 series would also benefit financial institutions to alert customers on instances like credit card payment reminders. Many subscribers have stopped taking transactional calls thinking the 140 series would indicate spam calls.

As per DoT’s notification, in the 1600ABCXXX format, AB would represent the relevant telecom circle while C would denote the telecom service provider. The last three digits would be anything between 000 and 999.

For a few years now, the government has been struggling to devise a fool-proof mechanism to deal with pesky calls.