TN Police plans counter-attack to Cyber Criminals' spoof calls

CHENNAI: Tamil Nadu Police's Cybercrime wing officials on Friday met with officials from Department of Telecommunications (DOT) and Telecom service providers on Friday to discuss the facilities available for blocking spoof calls, which have been used by cyber fraudsters from foreign countries to pose as if they are calling from Indian mobile phone numbers.

In nine months, from January 2024 to September 2024, as many as 4430 spoofed calls have been reported in National Cyber Crime Reporting portal which has been used for committing cyber crimes in Tamil Nadu, police said.

Friday's meeting focused on the use of the recently launched CIOR (Centralised International Out Roamer) system, an advanced tool to protect Indian telecom subscribers from fraudulent international spoofed calls.

The CIOR system targets the spoofed calls that appear to come from Indian numbers but are actually initiated by cybercriminals abroad.

Its goal is to stop these calls before they reach unsuspecting subscribers.

The CIOR system is being deployed in stages, initially targeting the spoofed calls using real telecom subscriber numbers. Future updates will address the additional spoofing techniques.

Subscribers can report suspicious spoofed calls via the Chakshu Portal on the Sanchar Saathi platform. This feedback will help to improve the system's accuracy and effectiveness, police said.

Additional Director General of Police (ADGP), Cyber Crime wing, Sandeep Mittal held discussions with officers from DOT and representatives of Airtel, Jio, BSNL, Vodafone at the Cyber crime wing headquarters in Ashok Nagar.

In the meeting, the facilities available for identifying and blocking spoofed calls were discussed.

In connection with this, various possibilities and shortcomings on the new feature of blocking incoming spoofed calls are discussed and suggestions were made to improve the existing system.

"As most of the spam calls are through VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) calls, the possibility of extending the facility of blocking the spoofed calls to VOIP Calls through WhatsApp, Skype etc are discussed and a proposal is made. As an outcome, the Cyber Crime Wing on a regular basis is planning to gather data from the service providers and the DOT on the number of spam calls landed through the service providers to reduce the incidence of spam calls," an official release stated.