The telco has also blocked over 800,000 fraudulent links across the network and over-the-top messaging apps such as WhatsApp. As a result, Airtel users have seen a 70% fall in incidence of scams as compared to other networks, said Rahul Vatts, chief regulatory officer, Bharti Airtel, citing data from the home ministry.
Vatts, who was speaking at the Safer Internet India Summit, said the nature of scams have evolved from simple emails to an industrialised action operating out of high-tech call centers.
“This (scams) is now a very big industry. It’s running on very state-of-the-art, high-tech call centers across the borders and this is really an industrialised action..there is social engineering, digital risks. The financial loss attached to scams globally is $1.03 trillion,” Vatts said.
Airtel is using over 250 parameters to determine patterns corresponding to spam and scam calls.
“We are not identifying a person to say you are a spammer. We are tagging a behaviour of a spammer. There are more than 250 parameters that track calls and messages in real time. The AI assigns a score to each caller depending on the behavioral patterns,” Vatts said.
Anirban Nandi, country director, Android Ecosystem, Google added that despite the perception that elderlies are more vulnerable to scams, data shows GenZ and millennials are twice as more likely to fall victim to scams. Citing an overconfidence paradox, Nandi said while 69% of users who believe they are digitally aware, over half of them still fell victims to scam calls in the last 12 months.
The search giant has also taken steps, adding a second layer on top of the telco-led layer in combating spam and scam calls, Nandi said. This uses on-device intelligence to track patterns corresponding to fraudulent behaviour.
Nandi said Google has helped block over 2 billion suspected spam and scam calls every month in India since the launch of the feature, saving over Rs 1,110 crore in potential fraud every month.
