The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has significantly expanded its 1600-number series, introducing the new 1601 series for utilities, courier, and logistics companies to combat rising impersonation fraud and help consumers identify legitimate service and transaction-related calls.
Key Points
- Trai has expanded the 1600-number series to include utilities, courier, and logistics companies, introducing the new 1601 series.
- The 1601 series aims to help consumers identify legitimate service and transaction-related calls and prevent impersonation fraud.
- Eligible entities include electricity, water, gas, and LPG distributors, as well as courier and logistics firms.
- Telecom operators will issue these numbers within 90 days, ensuring they are used exclusively for service and transaction calls, not promotions.
- The move follows concerns from BFSI entities that their legitimate 1600-series calls were being flagged as spam by call management apps.
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) on Monday expanded the 1600-number series beyond banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) to utilities, courier and logistics companies.
These entities will use the new 1601 series to help consumers identify legitimate calls and prevent fraud and impersonation.
Expanding the 1601 Series
In the first phase, the 1601 series will be available to electricity distribution companies, water utilities, city gas distribution companies, LPG distributors and other utility service providers.
Courier, express logistics, parcel delivery, freight and logistics companies engaged in delivering consignments will also be eligible for the series.
Telecom operators will issue the numbers over the next 90 days, after verifying the eligibility of entities and securing that the series numbers will be used exclusively for service and transaction-related calls and not for promotional calls.
The series will not be issued to intermediaries or aggregators providing platforms for these services.
Combating Impersonation Fraud
"Considering the critical and sensitive nature of communications made by the entities in BFSI sector and government, this separate series has been issued for the sectors other than BFSI and government in order to avoid mixing of important financial voice calls with the service and transactional calls from the other sectors," Trai said in a statement.
The regulator, however, did not specify the services that could be covered in future phases.
The move is aimed at curbing impersonation fraud, where scammers use regular 10-digit numbers and pose as representatives of legitimate businesses.
According to a recent Trai report, 1.15 billion calls originated from dedicated 1600-series numbers in the first quarter of FY27.
Previous Mandates and Challenges
Trai had earlier mandated the use of the 1600 series for service and transaction-related calls by BFSI entities and for government-to-citizen communication. The series was introduced earlier this year.
Trai recently cautioned call management apps and users against flagging 1600 numbers as spam, following a run-in with Truecaller, which had flagged that numbers from the 1600 series and another 140 series, meant only for promotional calls, often carried frequently blocked tags on its platform that were community-generated.
The clarification followed concerns from BFSI entities that calls to their customers were being blocked or marked as spam by platforms.
The 1600 series is used by entities regulated by the Reserve Bank of India, Securities and Exchange Board of India, Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India and Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority for service and transaction-related calls to existing customers.
