Fraudulent acts associated with telecommunication have become more prevalent. Photo: FILE

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“Miss, do you have any decorating plans?” or “Hello, do you require help with your financial situation?” Such calls are common, annoying and as hard to remove from today’s society as the residue of a sticker. At the end of last year, in a survey of 2,005 people by Social Investigation Center under China Youth Daily, 44.7 percent of respondents claimed to often receive harassing calls, and 42.1 percent of them said they pick up at least one each day.

Facing all kinds of harassing calls, Fan Xiaoshan, a white collar worker in Beijing, chooses to ignore them. “You just say that you don’t need it, then hang up. This is the best way. I used to say a few more words to them, but this gave them a wrong message that you may want this service. After that, they will keep calling from time to time. It really bothers me,” Fan said.

Intensive harassing calls trouble some people immensely, but few phone users will turn to police or defend their rights for anything less than telecom fraud. “Most harassing calls have caused some damage to consumers, but not major damage. Also, we need consumers to provide evidence for us to accept their complaints. Many of them give up on their complaints because the procedure costs time and money,” said Chen Lu, a lawyer from Beijing.

Reporting and prosecution are a hassle for most harassed phone users. The users don’t know whether the department of public security will take their cases. Are these cases too insignificant to be filed?

In recent years, fraudulent acts associated with telecommunication have become more prevalent. Without users’ consent, many calls have been made for malicious harassment or fraud, disturbing people’s lives and causing security risks.

In the second quarter of 2018, a total of 140,000 harassing calls were reported, according to the statistics of the Acceptance Center for Junk Information under the China Internet Association. Tencent Mobile Manager, the most used mobile security software in China, has marked 82.89 million calls as harassment.

Yang Tianyi of the Industry and Planning Research Institute at the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology found that most harassing calls are associated with commercial sales for finance, insurance, real estate and educational training. “The number of suspected illegal calls and malicious calls is much fewer than that of telemarketing calls,” Yang said.

Harassing calls have a wide range of features. The unwanted calls can be categorized into three kinds in terms of their damage to society. The first kind refers to harassment in which calls are repeated for intimidation and personal abuse. The goal of the second kind is commercial marketing, in which callers promote their products or services. Such calls are more targeted because of the rampant illegal trade of personal information. The third kind is telecommunications fraud. Criminals use recorded voice or internet telephones to spread fabricated information. Such remote fraud induces the victims to transfer money to the criminals.

Many consumers use cell phone functions to intercept harassment. They set up a blacklist to block unexpected calls. Some phones are equipped with this function. In other cases, users can download apps to their phones.

Users can adopt this approach and customize it to their needs, as it can block any kind of harassing calls. Not all mobile phones, however, can use it, because the method only works with specific devices or smart operating systems. If the caller’s phone number changes, users have to reset the blacklist. In addition, the current technology fails to block the calls from masked numbers.

Harassing calls are constantly recurring unsolicited phone calls. Many countries in the world have encountered such regulatory problems in the development of their information and communications industries. America, Singapore, Britain, Canada and other countries set up an anti-harassment list system that consists of legal and technological aspects. Users can register on the platform and choose whether to receive commercial advertising calls. Also, they can record the content of communications as a form of evidence. Any companies violating the laws must compensate individuals. In this way, harsh laws prevent harassing calls by regulating the business sector.

 

The article was translated from Legal Daily.

(edited by MA YUHONG)