From Friday next week, subscribers to Chunghwa Telecom’s (CHT) landline services are to receive a seven-second potential scam warning when they receive an international phone call, while its mobile phone service subscribers would hear the same warning when they receive a call from numbers beginning with +886 9, the National Communications Commission (NCC) said yesterday.
The NCC has from May 3 worked with Chunghwa Telecom to intercept incoming calls to landlines from numbers beginning with +886 0 to +886 8. Since July 17, landline users who receive calls from numbers beginning with +886 9 first hear a seven-second warning in Mandarin and Hoklo that it might be a scam.
The measures have made Taiwan the first country in the world to curb phone scams by intercepting suspicious phone numbers and issuing a voice warning over the phone.
Photo: Fang Wei-chieh, Taipei Times
The warning would now be heard whenever landline users receive international phone calls, as scammers can reroute calls to Taiwan through different countries, NCC Vice Chairman Wong Po-tsung (翁柏宗) told reporters at the commission’s weekly news briefing, adding that users would not be charged for listening to the warning.
“CHT originally planned to make the service available for its mobile phone users at the end of October. As the nation’s leading telecom, CHT has worked to make the service available by the middle of this month,” Wong said.
Taiwan Mobile and Far EasTone Telecommunications subscribers would be offered the service by the end of this month or the beginning of next month, he said.
The number of calls from +886 0 to +886 8 numbers dropped from 6.72 million in April to 200,000 last month, with the interception rate rising from 13.9 percent in April to 91.9 percent in May, 98.5 percent in June, 98.65 percent in July before falling to 95.8 percent last month, NCC data showed.
After the voice warning became available in July, calls from numbers beginning with +886 9 have dropped from 10.30 million in July to 1.47 million last month, the data showed.
The interception of suspicious calls and voice warnings have helped reduce the number of calls beginning with +886, from 26.6 percent of all phone calls to 4.8 percent, it showed.
The nation’s five major telecoms have been asked to work on the technology to distinguish between real international phone calls or those rerouted to Taiwan, Wong said.
In other news, Strait-Telecom Co (海峽電信) was fined NT$4.45 million (US$139,206) for failing to authenticate the identities of service subscribers and consequently allowing some phone numbers to be abused by scammers, the NCC said.
The commission on July 26 fined the mobile virtual network operator NT$300,000 for the same offense.
Chunghwa Telecom was going to allocate 30,000 mobile phone numbers for Strait-Telecom to use, Wong said.
An NCC investigation found that Strait-Telecom had used 9,000 of them, he said, adding that Chunghwa has halted allocation of the remaining phone numbers.
“We have found that Strait-Telecom continued to activate the use of mobile phone numbers through CHT’s application programming interface even after its license expired on May 27. As such, the commission ruled to investigate CHT’s potential oversight in this matter,” Wong said.
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