NEW legislation aiming to protect the public from telephone scams and cold-calling is under construction, and will attempt to attack it at source by tightening up on commercial use of customers' personal data.
Spain's government hopes to tackle phone scams, which generate around 400,000 complaints per year (photo: vecstock/Freepik)
Websites consulted to check the source of unknown callers' numbers, allowing complaints to be registered, mean most companies or organisations behind cold calls can be identified with a quick internet search – and these frequently show that the same organisation uses a multitude of different numbers to catch people out.
According to Spain's minister for digital transformation and public function, Óscar López, around 400,000 complaints per year are logged for telephone scams and telesales calls – a number that has been growing annually since remote working became more commonplace as a result of the pandemic.
Some of the measures set to be taken have been outlined, with others likely to be announced as the new legislation is developed in conjunction with key telephone operators in Spain.
What changes will be made?
Top of the list is a ban on commercial cold-calling or telesales from mobile numbers – those companies or organisations who continue with this practice will be required to do so from landlines.
Unassigned phone numbers – which are not registered to any customer, operator or service – will be blocked at source.
Calls and text messages from outside of Spain but using a Spanish number as a 'front' will be blocked automatically by operators.
This does not mean anyone with a Spanish mobile phone using it from abroad will be unable to get through – the blocked numbers are those which appear on a phone screen as being Spanish, but their actual source telephone number is elsewhere in the world; a common tactic of international scammers who use technology to disguise the true origin of the call.
Existing consumer protection legislation already restricts telesales calls at certain times of day, and gives users the right to de-register or unsubscribe from contact lists much more swiftly and easily – and it is likely these requirements will be strengthened.
The new law will be aimed at tackling what the ministry calls 'abusive use' of personal data by 'certain companies' – such as selling on their customers' details to other firms for them to generate sales leads, without the express knowledge or permission of the consumer.
Excessive and unethical – even if not illegal – data sharing paves the way for scammers, the ministry believes, and the law framework restricting this practice will be reviewed and updated much more regularly to adapt to new scam and commercial methods and ongoing technology development.
In conjunction with the National Markets and Competition Commission (CNMC), Óscar López's department will create a database of text message senders who use a combination of letters and numbers as their ID.
Standard text messages – SMS or MMS – will show up on a mobile screen as coming from a telephone number, but some commercial messages will appear with the sender as the company name, or as a combination of alphanumeric characters.
Once the database is set up, any text messages with this type of sender ID which have not been previously logged will be blocked, preventing the recipient from getting them.
Although not mentioned so far, it is expected that the forthcoming legislation will clamp down on so-called 'silent calls' – where an automated system is programmed to ring members of the public at different times of day to work out when they are most likely to be available to answer, enabling sales personnel to time their cold calls more effectively.
If the recipient answers the call, there will be no human on the other end, and the call will end automatically; when the recipient rings the number back to find out who it was, they receive only an answering machine with no option to leave a message.
When is the new law likely to come into effect?
Minister Óscar López explains the anti-cold call legislation is part of a 'wider consumer protection framework' which different government departments are working on.
This 'wider framework' is expected to go live 'within the next few months', although a more exact timeframe has not been given.
López's indications do, however, hint that the law will probably be effective within the first half of 2025, but would seem unlikely to be in force before the end of the current year.
