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Very often, consumers fall victim to scams through fraud calls when they fail to distinguish between genuine and fraudulent calls.
A new numbering series with the prefix ‘160’ for 10-digit numbers is being introduced by the government and this will be used for official communication with the public. This is being done to tackle the problem of fraud calls.
The new number series replaces the currently used ‘140xxxxxxx’ and has been allocated to telemarketers to make calls related to promotions, services, and transactional voice calls.
In order to build confidence among consumers, the Centre recognised the need to build a different number system through which the public can easily differentiate between spam calls and genuine service or transactional calls when both show 10-digit numbers.
‘160xxxxxxx’ will be exclusively used for service and transactional voice calls by genuine government agencies and authorities. For example, the calls originating from financial and regulatory entities like RBI, Sebi, etc. will begin with ‘1601’.
The new numbers series will be visible to mobile users in the ‘1600ABCXXX’ format. Here, ‘AB’ represents the code of the telecom circle, for instance, 11 represents Delhi, ‘C’ represents the code of the telecom operator, and XXX will contain digits between 000 and 999.