Of these, 45 percent of spam calls were settled by Viettel, 7 percent by MobiFone, 1 percent by Vietnamobile, and 0.5 percent by I Telecom.

Viettel prevented 7,844 subscribers from delivering spam calls, VNPT 7,301 and MobiFone 1,155.

AoT in July 2020 sent a document on preventing spam calls to telecom carriers. In the document, the watchdog agency described ‘spam calls’ and pointed out the responsibilities of telecom carriers in preventing the behavior of delivering spam calls and protecting consumers.

If telecom carriers don’t prevent spam calls, they may be punished in accordance with Clause 3, Article 66 of Decree No 185/2013/ND-CP dated November 15, 2013 which stipulates administrative fines for producing and trading counterfeit and prohibited goods.

Following the document, mobile network operators agreed to prevent spam calls by applying technical measures. The prevention and filtration of spam calls is carried out under the Law on Protection of Consumers’ Rights.

In the last six months of 2020, network operators blocked 89,649 subscribers that spread spam calls, which showed the great effort made by state management agencies and telecom carriers.

Spam calls and messages are delivered mostly to advertise products and services, such as offers to sell houses, apartments, and condotels, and include invitations to buy insurance policy, use financial services and register for English training courses.

The subjects that deliver spam calls and messages use sophisticated technical measures which change regularly to fool appropriate agencies. It can be difficult dealing with this kind of violation.

State management agencies have called on people to join forces with agencies and telecom carriers to prevent calls.

After each call from a subscriber suspected of delivering spam calls, telecom carriers will send a question under the form of USSD (unstructured supplementary service data) message in order to collect users’ comments. Users should cooperate with carriers by answering the question to complain if the subscriber actually delivered spam calls.

The systems of mobile network operators are integrated with machine learning.

In another way, users can complain about spam calls and messages by sending messages to Switchboard 5656.

In addition, users can register the entry in the Do Not Call list, i.e. a list of subscribers who refuse ads by sending a message with DK DNC to 5656. 

Trong Dat

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