Alex Trelinski
OVER 50 million spam phone calls and text messages have been blocked by telecoms companies in Spain since March.
The high number of interceptions follows the launch of the government’s measures against identity theft scams.
The figures were revealed on Monday by Digital Transformation Minister, Oscar Lopez.
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Since March 7, operators like Vodafone, Telefonica, and MasOrange have to block numbers that are not registered to any user or service.
The plan kicked into another phase from June 7.
Phone owners can now no longer get calls and texts that originate from abroad but are claiming to have come from a Spanish number.
Commercial ‘cold calls’ are also now prohibited from mobile numbers which are used to hoodwink people who cannot identify the origin of a caller.
Commercial calls can only be made via a geographic phone prefix, numbers that are specifically allocated for commercial communications, or from 800 or 900 prefixes.
Since March, 47,971,400 calls and 2,212,950 texts have been blocked, representing 85% and 87%, respectively, of total phone fraud attempts.
In June and July, the average number of blocked calls per day was 439,915 plus 18,666 texts.
The next stage which will come into force at the end of 2026, will be the creation of an official database with the alphanumeric codes used by companies and public administrations as identifiers for text messages.
The database will be managed by the National Commission on Markets and Competition (CNMC) and will seek to stop fraudsters assuming identities of banks, postal services and all service companies.
Oscar Lopez admitted that fraudsters have switched to using national prefixes but his ministry and telecoms firms are working out how to stop that.
He confirmed that the cost of implementing these measures will be borne entirely by telecommunications companies, which receive no public subsidy.
“I don’t think it is a very important cost but the really relevant cost is the one that these scams cause to citizens,” said Lopez.
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