Comreg says that 7,000 numbers have already been pre-registered on new industry whitelist and that non-registered numbers will be labelled as ‘likely scam’ and blocked from this Autumn
From next month, companies that use mass-texting services and that haven’t registered with the telecoms regulator will see their SMS texts to customers labelled as “likely scam”. From October, such texts will be blocked altogether.
The regulator’s SMS Sender ID registry system is aimed at those who use ‘Sender ID’ to attach a name to a mobile number, such as Bank Of Ireland or Amazon or An Post.
At present, scammers can fairly easily ‘spoof’ these names, which is why irish people get so many texts which appear to be from legitimate businesses and utilities but are not. In the worst cases, the spoofed SMS messages even appear in existing customer interaction conversations with the legitimate business.
The new system is designed to eliminate this kind of ‘spoofing’, so that from October, Irish consumers won’t receive fraudulent SMS text messages of this type. Comreg said that it is the mobile network operators that will ultimately block the texts, as they will have access to the register of legitimate Sender ID companies.
Comreg says that any companies or organisations that haven’t registered should do so now, to avoid their SMS messages being labelled or blocked.
However, the new initiative won’t apply to regular, private SMS numbers, meaning that a scammer who simply buys a sim card and sends out bulk SMS messages won’t be affected.
Comreg says that it is still waiting for legislation from the government that’s needed to apply SMS ‘filter’ technology that could help in reducing private SMS text scamming.
Comreg research found about 365,000 cases of fraud per year as a result of scam calls and texts in Ireland, with 89 million “annoying or irritating” communications because of it.
It also estimates that around 5,000 businesses per annum are the victim of fraud after receiving scam calls and texts and that the annual cost of scam texts is €115m each year, rising to €300m per year when scam calls are counted.
A lot of companies rely on SMS to update customers on things like delivery updates, appointments and financial transactions,
This business-to-customer texting, known as Application-to-Person (A2P) messaging, often includes an alphanumeric identifier or SMS Sender ID that may be the name of the company or brand that sent the message, such as BankX or DoctorY.
Organisations using SMS Sender IDs in their messages to their customers are being told by Comreg that they should instruct their SMS provider to pre-register those SMS Sender IDs with the regulator now by February 25th.
Otherwise, from July 3rd, SMS texts with unregistered Sender IDs will be labelled “likely scam” and October 3rd, SMS texts with unregistered SMS Sender IDs will be blocked.
“ComReg is actively engaging with mobile service providers, SMS Aggregators and organisations using SMS Sender IDs to ensure that as many legitimate SMS Sender IDs as possible are registered before the ‘likely scam’ modification phase begins on 3 July 2025,” said Garrett Blaney, ComReg chairperson.
“The SMS Sender ID Registry is just one of a number of interventions introduced by ComReg to help mitigate the scourge of scam phone calls and text messages.”
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