Scams are one of the most significant consumer protection challenges across the world. Specifically in India, 53% of adults have reported lifetime exposure to scams, according to GSMA’s ASEAN Consumer Scam Report 2025. The attack surface is predominantly digital and increasingly fragmented across channels that ride on telecom infrastructure. Consumers report encountering scams through various communication journeys with nearly 46% of the scammers approaching victims through over-the-top (OTT) communication applications, followed by SMS (37%).
Recognising the scale and systemic nature of this threat, telecom regulators have intensified their efforts towards consumer protection, placing stringent regulations introducing and tightening regulations to curb unsolicited commercial communications, phishing and financial fraud. These measures placed clear responsibilities on mobile network operators (MNOs) to implement stronger, technology driven safeguards across their networks.
Against this regulatory backdrop, Airtel have moved beyond compliance to pioneer proactive, largescale fraud mitigation solutions. In a first-of-its-kind move, the company introduced an AI powered spam detection solution in September 2024, designed to protect customers from spam calls and messages in real time.
The AI solution analyses parameters such as caller or sender’s usage patterns, call/SMS frequency, call duration, etc., and cross-references against known spam patterns to identify suspected spam behavior. The solution also alerts Airtel customers of malicious links they may have received via SMS. To do so, it scans SMS’s against its centralised database of malicious links. The solution has analysed over 1.5 billion SMS and 2.4 billion calls every day, enabling real-time detection at a national scale. The solution blocks 1.17 million spammers per day on average.
Balancing consumer protection while ensuring business continuity
As Airtel strengthened its spam control capabilities, it also recognised a critical second order challenge: the risk of legitimate enterprises being inadvertently flagged as suspected spammers. With this realisation, ensuring that consumer protection did not come at the cost of business continuity, it became an important design principle.
Addressing the concern of legitimate businesses getting flagged as suspected spammers, Airtel launched its Business Name Display (BND) Solution in May 2025. This solution shows users name of the business calling them, ensuring that the customer does not unknowingly reject a legitimate business call. The service is currently active for thousands of business numbers.
Expanding the fight to fraudulent links and domains
As scam typologies continued to evolve, Airtel observed that a significant and growing proportion of fraud incidents originated from fraudulent links and domains, often distributed across multiple communication channels rather than through traditional calls or SMS alone. These links were increasingly delivered via OTT communication platforms such as email, messaging apps, and social media.
In response, Airtel developed and deployed a comprehensive fraud detection solution that blocks customer access to known fraudulent domains across all OTT communication applications. The solution leverages Airtel’s proprietary database of fraudulent domains, enriched through global threat intelligence feeds and partner APIs that assess domains against multiple risk indicators.
Since its inception, the fraud detection solution has identified and blocked more than 1,87,154 fraudulent domains, preventing approximately 30,47,727 fraud attempts daily.
The cumulative impact of these measures has been substantial. According to data from the Government of India’s Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) — Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), financial loss values have declined by 68.7% and cybercrime on Airtel’s network has declined by 14.3%.
The need for ecosystem wide collaboration
Despite these advances, fraud mitigation today remains fundamentally asymmetrical. This disparity creates exploitable gaps that fraudsters readily leverage, shifting from regulated telecom channels to OTT environments. Addressing this imbalance requires deeper collaboration between OTT platforms and MNOs. A safe and trusted communications ecosystem can only be achieved when all entities participating in the delivery of voice and messaging services work together to protect consumers consistently across channels.
Discussing the need for collaborative effort to curb scam, Gopal Vittal, GSMA Chair and Executive Vice Chairman – Bharti Airtel said,
“Scams are evolving into a systemic, cross channel threat that requires equal systemic solutions. At Airtel, we believe protecting customers cannot be reactive or limited to compliance alone. By deploying AI driven, network level safeguards at national scale, we are demonstrating how technology, regulation, and operator accountability can come together to meaningfully reduce fraud. However, lasting impact will only be achieved when all participants in the communications ecosystem, including OTT platforms, take shared responsibility for consumer protection.”
To learn more, please visit the Scams use case library.