Union minister for Railways, Communications, Electronics & Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw recently launched two new portals from the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) to check cyber crime and financial frauds.
The Digital Intelligence Platform (DIP) is a backend module which allows real time intelligence sharing between law enforcement agencies, banks, financial intermediaries like PhonePe, telecom service providers, social media companies like WhatsApp and Telegram, and document issuing authorities. When a number is used in a fraud, it will be shared with all the stakeholders in one go and blocked across all their platforms.
This portal is not accessible to citizens but acts as a backend repository for requests initiated on the Sanchar Saathi portal by citizens. The other portal –- Chakshu (which means an eye in Hindi) –- is a facility on the Sanchar Saathi portal. It allows users to report suspected fraud communications that people receive over call, SMS or WhatsApp.
When such information is received, the system will require the user who complained to re-verify their number and if they fail in the re-verification process, their number will be disconnected.
The DoT is also working on setting up a grievance redressal portal to report connections that were disconnected by mistake, and to return money in frozen accounts to citizens by coordinating with the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and the Department of Financial Services.
The Sanchar Saathi portal was launched in May 2023 and its different portals allow citizens to report to block their lost or stolen mobile phones (CEIR), know how many mobile connections are connected to each other using common KYC (TAFCOP), and other things.
Since it was launched, it has been used to disconnect more than 10 million mobile connections for different reasons. Using CEIR, 1.4 million mobile handsets have been blocked on user request while 7,00,000 handsets have been traced and their information has been given to state governments.
