By Yoon Ja-young
When a person gets a call from abroad in the future, either a text message or voice message will notify the recipient.
The regulator plans to make it obligatory for telephone companies to provide such information to fight “voice phishing” scams that often originate from overseas in order to avoid tracking and prosecution.
The Korea Communications Commission (KCC) announced Monday that a revision bill on the Electric Communication Business has been prepared, obliging phone services to inform a recipient of an international call, and blocking calls that manipulate the caller phone number.
The bill will be submitted to the National Assembly by the end of this month.
Currently, some International call services inform the recipient when the call is an overseas call, but the regulator has decided to make it obligatory for all. “The voice phishing scams through Internet phone calls have especially been problematic these days, so we expand the obligation to Internet phone services,” explained Kim Jun-dong, an official at the KCC.
He added that senior citizens in rural areas have been major victims of the scam, but the previous text notice appearing on the cell phone was useless for them as they either had poor eyesight or use wired phones at home.
If the phone services fail to fulfill this obligation, they will be levied up to 30 million won as penalty.
The revision also demands that the communication businesses should block the international call if the caller manipulates the caller number to fool the recipient as if it is a local call, especially a financial company or public institution like the post office.
With Internet phones, one can change the caller number.
Hence, criminals can call someone’s family and pretend they kidnapped a family member by making his or her phone number appear as the caller number.
They can also make the number seem as if they were calling from banks or credit card companies. This easily fools the victims into sending money to the fraudsters.
According to the regulator, the financial damage from voice phishing amounted to over 300 billion won during the past five years, but it wasn’t easy to root it out as the deceptive calls were made from abroad.