The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has recently introduced the ‘160’ series phone numbers. TRAI announced that, in the first phase, entities regulated by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI),
Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (IRDAI), and Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority (PFRDA) will switch to ‘160’ phone number series for service and transaction calls.
This means that henceforth, service and transaction calls from insurance companies, banks, financial companies, and other organizations will originate from phone numbers starting with ‘160’.
This move by TRAI aims to help consumers easily identify fraudulent calls from scammers.
The decision was made during a meeting on Friday between TRAI officials and representatives from RBI, SEBI, and IRDAI. Over 25 banks, including government, private, international banks, telecom operators, and other financial institutions, attended the meeting.
They discussed converting the current operations of the ‘140’ series used for promotional purposes to Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) and implementing digital consent.
With the implementation of the ‘160’ series for service and transaction calls and the ‘140’ series for marketing, TRAI stated that there will be significant control over spam calls originating from 10-digit numbers. Currently, telecom operators are using artificial intelligence to directly block many spam numbers from companies.