When the telemarketing companies began to go overboard in making unsolicited calls and sending a barrage of sms / text messages to mobile phone customers in India, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) came to customers’ rescue.
Government of India’s agency, TRAI, setup a National Do Not Disturb Registry and invited customers to register their phone number. Once registered, it becomes illegal to make marketing calls or send such sms to that phone number. In reality, however, you still do get such calls/sms. Although the number and frequency may get reduced. So, it’s beneficial to some extent. Also, if you register in DND database, you can take legal action against such callers.
Send an SMS to 1909 with the following text:
START DND
or
START 0
Now you can say NO to promotional calls!
If you want to block only certain types of calls/sms, you can do so by invoking DND only on specific sectors. Send the following SMS to 1909
START <option>
In place of <option> you should write the number given to sectors. The options are:
(1) Banking/Insurance/Financial products/credit cards.
(2) Real Estate.
(3) Education.
(4) Health.
(5) Consumer goods and automobiles.
(6) Airtel Products & Services/Communication/Broadcasting/ Entertainment/IT.
(7) Tourism and Leisure.
(0) Fully Blocked.
For example, if you want to block calls of from marketers selling flats, plots and other real estate properties, send the following to 1909:
START 2
You can combine many sectors in one request as below:
START 2,3,7
By the way, you can also use TrueCaller mobile app. It really helps in automatically blocking known spam callers. The app also gives you details of incoming calls which are not listed in your phone book. You may want to give it a try! Let’s now proceed with DND service.
If for some reason, the SMS method does not work, you can also call 1909 and follow the instructions given by the Interactive Voice Response (IVR). Once registered, you can later on confirm if your number is correctly listed in the DND registry.
Usually it takes a week or so for your mobile service provider to take notice of your registration in DND and stop promotional calls/messages.
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