India's New Telecom Rules: How They Battle Rising Cyber Fraud

The amendment aims to address vulnerabilities from the rapid integration of telecom identifiers into digital services across banking, e-commerce, and governance, an official statement said.

Further, they aim to bridge existing regulatory gaps and strengthen cyber resilience through collaborative mechanisms with entities using telecom identifiers.

The government notified that the amendments remain in force and enforceable despite an inadvertent republication, which was rescinded by notification.

The Telecommunication Cyber Security Amendment Rules, 2025, added a framework, namely, the Mobile Number Validation platform, to curb mule accounts and identity fraud from unverified linkages of mobile numbers with financial and digital services.

This mechanism enabled service providers to validate, through a decentralised and privacy-compliant platform, whether a mobile number used for a service genuinely belongs to the person on the record.

The amendment also required entities dealing in resale or refurbished devices to scrub every device's IMEI number through a centralised database of blacklisted IMEIs before resale, protecting consumers and assisting law enforcement in tracking stolen equipment.

India's growing second-hand device market has become a hotspot for the circulation of blacklisted, stolen, or cloned phones, leaving genuine purchasers vulnerable to legal complications, the statement noted.

The rules defined Telecom Identifier User Entity and mandated them to share relevant telecom‑identifier data with the government in specified, regulated circumstances to improve traceability, accountability and coordination against telecom‑linked cyber fraud while maintaining data protection norms.

Collectively, these amendments aim to safeguard India's digital ecosystem against telecom-enabled frauds, strengthen device traceability, and ensure responsible use of telecom identifiers, the statement noted.

- IANS