“The mobile operator has a lot of capabilities. They are the ones who should be controlling it (fraud prevention), rather than passing the buck to app providers. App providers are just riding on the mobile operators’ network layer,” said Parag Kar, former Qualcomm Vice President for Government Affairs (India and South Asia), at MediaNama’s ‘Impact of SIM Binding on Social Media’ discussion.
For context, Kar was outlining what telecom operators could do to prevent digital financial fraud, in light of the Department of Telecommunications’ (DoT) recent SIM binding directive. To explain, this directive instructs messaging applications like WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Arattai and Snapchat to ensure that users bind their SIM cards to their respective messaging services.
However, as MediaNama reported earlier, it isn’t technically feasible to implement SIM binding mandate at this stage. Similarly, various participants in the discussion also pointed out how the SIM binding mandate doesn’t stop financial frauds: signalling the possible need to find alternatives that will make ends meet without causing too much inconvenience to the users and businesses that use messaging apps for their operations.
Commercial Reasons Behind SIM Binding
Major smartphone operating systems (OS) like iOS and Android restrict an application’s access to SIM-related as well as a mobile phone’s hardware-related data to preserve the privacy of users.
Speculating about the need to push the SIM binding mandate even though it is technically infeasible, Kar said that, “The reason the mobile operator is pushing for the SIM binding is [a] commercial [one]. They also know that it is not practically possible to implement.”
“They want to make money. That’s why they are going ahead and saying that we want everybody to send SMS. Everybody should be sending SMS all the time,” he added.
‘SIM Binding Can’t Solve the Scam Problem’
Venkata Satish Guttula, Cyber Security Consultant at Allied Boston Consultants India Pvt Ltd., asked: “So what is going to stop the fraudsters from using these international numbers? There are certain things called virtual numbers, where I can just buy these virtual numbers and then use them, or else eSIMs. I can activate eSIMs and then use international eSIMs, and use those virtual numbers to commit fraud. So is that what it [SIM binding] is trying to solve?”
“It is not solving the problem that is being advertised as it is. It will not stop the frauds that are happening. This [SIM binding] is not a silver bullet,” he added.
While Guttula also said that fraudsters could easily switch to other messaging services or platforms such as email, Nikhil Pahwa, MediaNama’s Editor and Founder, pointed out that users can create accounts on apps like Telegram without even entering their mobile number.
And addressing the possibility of platforms bypassing Telecom Identifier User Entity…
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