The French Telecoms Federation has announced the deployment of a system preventing the spoofing of 10-digit telephone numbers. This type of abuse was particularly widely used to impersonate banking institutions.
It is the Naegelen law, adopted in 2020, which imposes much stricter security and control conditions on telephone operators. But although this legislation will be four years old, its application has been delayed, in particular because of the technical difficulties that such guarantees pose. But the system, now ready, should come into full operation from next fall.
A device that already exists in the United States
Romain Bonenfant, the director general of the French Telecoms Federation, returned to The Parisian in detail on the system which should reduce telephone scams. He explains that the latter will mainly rely on telephone operators: the latter, who for the moment have the main obligation to route calls, will receive new missions. They will now also have to verify, both on the side of the person calling and the person being called, that the telephone number corresponds to the one registered with ARCEP, the sector authority.
If the principle is a priori simple, its application is, according to Romain Bonenfant, very long and laborious, and its main difficulty lies in the need to deploy this system among the more than 200 operators operating in France. For the moment, only one country in the world already has regulation and a similar system, the United States, even if they only impose it on the largest operators. The French version is therefore inspired by the version across the Atlantic, but more ambitious and even more complete.
Reduce “spoofing”, not other scams
The implementation of this system should therefore reduce and even virtually eliminate telephone scams based on telephone number theft, also called spoofing. Although these represent a significant part of the sector, and particularly affect banking scams, this will not solve all the problems and the scammers have more than one trick up their sleeve.
Because not all scams involve number theft, on the one hand, and it should also be possible to circumvent this protection. As Mr. Bonenfant explains, “There are cases of fraud where the bank number is not presented. There may also be hacking of establishments’ computer systems”.
For him, banks also have their share of the work to do to fight against fraud, just like users.
Source : The Parisian
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