Telcos passing off wirelines as mobile numbers to evade charges

New Delhi: Reliance Jio has alleged incumbents, including state-run BSNL, Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea, have fraudulently masquerading wireline numbers as mobile numbers for receiving terminating charges as mobile numbers and not paying relevant charges in willful and blatant violation of existing laws.
The Mukesh Ambani company hit at the rivals, saying this implementation of masquerading the wireline number as mobile numbers is a case of deliberate and fraudulent attempt made by incumbents to illegally extract mobile termination charge of 6 paise/minute from originating operator, whereas in reality the call is getting terminated on a wireline network.
Jio recently started charging 6 paise a minute for calls to other networks.
In a letter to the Trai chairman R.S. Sharma, Jio said: “1. Your attention is invited to fraudulently masquerading wireline numbers as mobile numbers by Bharti Airtel, Vodafone Idea Limited and BSNL for undue enrichment by receiving terminating charge as mobile number and not paying IN charges in willful and blatant violation of the IUC Regulations, National Numbering Plan 2003 and subsequent Department of Telecommunications (DoT) letters on toll-free numbers and Intelligent Network Services in Multi-Operator and Multi-Network Scenario Regulations by offering mobile numbers to various enterprises as their customer care or helpline numbers”.
“Since these fraudulent activities of masquerading wire-line numbers by mobile numbers is causing huge loss to some operators as well as to the exchequer and undue enrichment of incumbent operators apart from being not in public and telecom sector interest, Authority is humbly requested to direct the Incumbent Operators to stop this fraudulent cheating practice with immediate effect.” Jio has also asked for penalties to be put on those operators practicing the activities.