Replacement numbers changed hands

The Antifraud system of Roskomnadzor, which is supposed to help protect against spoofing of phone numbers, currently covers only three-quarters of the Russian number space, according to data from the Ministry of Digital Development and the Prosecutor General’s Office. Because of this, prosecutors must manually identify operators for violations, which creates the risk of errors. To avoid them, law enforcement officers should pay attention to the technical markings of the number as international, according to the recommendations of the departments. Without them, people may mistake a subscriber number from Kazakhstan or Vietnam for an allegedly spoofed one in Russia – this, as a Kommersant source explains, leads to unfounded appeals to the court.

“Kommersant” got acquainted with the methodological recommendations of the Prosecutor General’s Office and the Ministry of Digital Development regarding holding telecom operators accountable for missing calls from abroad with spoofed telephone numbers (parts 1 and 2 of Article 13.2.1 of the Code of Administrative Offenses of the Russian Federation). Traffic typically flows through a chain of operators, and the guidelines outline how prosecutors should find the person responsible for allowing a spoofed number to pass through.

This chain should be automatically verified by Roskomnadzor’s Antifraud system, launched in January. All telecom operators in the Russian Federation must connect by the end of February 2024. As follows from the document, only 77.5% of the Russian numbering resource actually falls under verification.

Until the system is fully deployed, prosecutors must determine for themselves which of the operators in the chain allowed the call to be missed with a number spoofed, it follows from the document. The Ministry of Digital Development confirmed to Kommersant that they sent the document to operators, without specifying the date. The interlocutor at the market says that he received the materials in November.

Judging by the document, the procedure is now extremely bureaucratic. To identify the violator, the prosecutor, guided by the recommendations, should request information about two operators: the one who was higher in the connection chain, and the one whose network was the source of the call.

Next, he must similarly request each of the operators along the chain until he determines the source of the number substitution. If all operators report that there is no spoofing of the number, or do not respond to the request, the prosecutor should require Roskomnadzor to check each company.

The fact of the presence or absence of operators joining the Antifraud system “does not change the grounds for prosecution,” the document clarifies. Now some operators challenging fines for missing calls with substitute numbers are appealing precisely to the fact that they have already connected to Antifraud (see Kommersant on November 22).

The guidelines also outline how prosecutors should determine whether a call came from a foreign network or not. If you focus only on the country code +7, and not on the technical indicator of an international call, then you can accidentally hold the operator accountable for missing a legitimate call from Kazakhstan, Abkhazia and South Ossetia (their codes, like in the Russian Federation, begin with +7).

Missing a call to Russia with a number similar to Russian ones should not be considered a violation. The paper gives the example of Vietnam (country code +84), whose numbers may be similar to numbers in the Russian numbering system (for example, 8 495…).

VimpelCom and MegaFon declined to comment; the Prosecutor General’s Office did not respond to Kommersant’s request. MTS reported that they “comply with all requirements for transferring the subscriber number unchanged.” Tele2 hopes that “the clarifications will reduce the number of appeals to the court.”

The head of the Association of Small Telecom Operators, Dmitry Galushko, however, doubts that the clarifications will lead to a reduction in the number of fines: “Market participants are now more concerned about the demands they receive to connect to Antifraud and the fines for failure to comply, prescribed in paragraph 3 of the same article of the Administrative Code” .

Yuri Litvinenko, Tatiana Isakova