Anyone who is using a phone in India knows the pain of unwanted spam calls offering personal loans, credit cards and what not. Even though you have enabled DND, you still get lot of spam calls. The problem is that most financial institutions take third party help to find potential customers. When you ask them why you are getting calls from the bank asking for loans, they straightaway say that its not their number. TRAI has made it very easy for us to get some respite from this. In this post, I explain how you can reduce the number of spam calls to your phone. Do note that this is not a one step process and that you need to continue doing this as long as you get spam calls.
First, you have to register DND for your number. You can activate a full DND by sending sms ‘START 0’ to 1909. You will then get a DND registration number for your phone. From that point on, you have a right to report spam callers.
When you get a call from spam callers, there is no need to tell them that you will report their number and there is no need to tell them that you have DND on. Just cut the call and report the number using DND 2.0 application.
When you click on Report Voice UCC or SMS UCC, you will get a list of callers. Select the number you want to report.
Now, select what type of call it was and then add description of spam call in 145 characters. Click on ‘Complain through sms’.
An sms will be created and you can click on ‘send’ to send the SMS. You will now get complaint number.
In many cases, I recieved response from my network that the number was disconnected for violating DND rules. Do note that you can only report calls/SMS that are less than 7 days old.
Once everyone starts reporting every single spam call they get to TRAI, the number of spam callers will reduce. As long as we all cut the call and forget about it, the calls will continue.
In MIUI Phones, permission has to be added manually for getting list of messages from header like XY-AAAA. For this, Please go to app permissions and click on other permissions. You will find Service SMS field which is disabled. Please enable this field and see that the header sms will be available in DND App.
TRAI’s UCC Regulations, Amendments can be seen at: http://www.trai.gov.in/telecom/consumer-initiatives/unsolicited-commercial-communication.
