The Australian Communications and Media Authority’s new SMS Sender ID Register has gone live today, providing what the ACMA is calling an \u201cimportant new measure\u201d to combat text message impersonation scams.<\/p>\n
From today, text messages sent from organisations that are unregistered will be labelled as \u2018unverified\u2019 and grouped together into a single message thread.<\/p>\n
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ACMA Chair Nerida O\u2019Loughlin said the new scheme will provide Australians with an additional prompt to check the legitimacy of any messages they receive.<\/p>\n
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\u201cFrom today, Australians will start seeing a clear difference between SMS messages sent from registered sender IDs and those that have not been registered,\u201d O\u2019Loughlin said in a July 1 statement.<\/p>\n
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\u201cIf a message is marked as \u2018Unverified\u2019, it should be treated with extra caution. It may be from a legitimate business or organisation that has not yet registered its sender ID, or it may be a scam message impersonating a trusted brand.<\/p>\n
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\u201cEither way, the message is simple \u2013 stop and think before you click a link or provide information to the sender.\u201d<\/p>\n
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O\u2019Loughlin acknowledged the importance of text messages, which are used for many essential services, from reminders for medical appointments and banking alerts to parcel delivery updates.<\/p>\n
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\u201cWhile the register grows, messages from unregistered sender IDs are being labelled rather than blocked,\u201d O\u2019Loughlin said.<\/p>\n
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\u201cThis gives businesses and organisations time to register their legitimate sender IDs, while giving consumers a clear signal to pause and verify messages marked \u2018Unverified\u2019.<\/p>\n
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\u201cThere is no cut-off date for registration and businesses and organisations that rely on branded SMS and have not registered their sender IDs should contact their messaging provider as soon as possible.<\/p>\n
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\u201cTelcos have clear responsibilities under the register rules. We expect them to identify unregistered sender IDs, apply the \u2018Unverified\u2019 label where required, communicate with their customers about the changes and continue helping businesses and organisations register legitimate sender IDs.\u201d<\/p>\n
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O\u2019Loughlin said the ACMA will be actively monitoring industry compliance, and that telcos found wanting will face penalties of up to $250,000 for any message sent in contravention of the new rules.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Australian Communications and Media Authority’s new SMS Sender ID Register has gone live today, providing what the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":771139,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[64,63,44],"class_list":["post-771138","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-australia","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/771138","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=771138"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/771138\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/771139"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=771138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=771138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=771138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}