The Centre on Tuesday mandated access service providers to take concrete measures to curb misuse of messaging services, effective September 1.

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has mandated them to migrate telemarketing calls starting with 140 series to an online distributed ledger technology (DLT) platform by September 30 for better monitoring and control, IANS reported.

Effective September 1, all access service providers will be prohibited from transmitting messages containing URLs, APKs, OTT links, or callback numbers which are not whitelisted by the senders.

The TRAI directive further mandated that the trail of all messages from senders to recipients must be traceable from November 1, 2024. Any message with an undefined or mismatched telemarketer chain will be rejected.

To deter the misuse of templates for promotional content, TRAI has introduced punitive measures for non-compliance.

“Content templates registered under the wrong category will be blacklisted, and repeated offenses will lead to a one-month suspension of the sender’s services,” said the government.

All “headers and content Templates registered on DLT must adhere to prescribed guidelines. Additionally, a single content template cannot be linked to multiple Headers”.

In case of misuse of headers or content templates of any sender comes to the notice, TRAI has directed immediate suspension of traffic from all the headers and content templates of that sender for their verification.

The telecom regulator said that the revocation of traffic from the sender shall be done only after legal action is taken by the sender against such misuse.

Further, delivery telemarketers must identify and report entities responsible for such misuse within two business days, failing which they will face similar consequences,” said TRAI.

Last week, the Centre directed all access service providers to immediately stop voice promotional calls, whether pre-recorded or computer generated, or from all unregistered senders or telemarketers.