Editorial – Feb 2023

The National Informatics Centre (NIC) got scammed by a SMS provider acting in cahoots, it seems with some unknown BSNL officials. Since the electronic evidence was compelling, the provider, Virtuoso Netsoft Pvt Ltd admitted that it had used NIC’s SMS Header, sending out messages to general public offering them jobs of Rs 16K. Virtuoso’s complicity was confirmed by BSNL and the case is now being investigated by the Special Cell of the Delhi Police. A FIR has been registed under various sections of the IT Act.

NIC has over 1,100 SMS headers for its clients, most of which are government departments and are used for sending service messages to beam government instructions or spread awareness. Virtuoso stole NIC SMS Headers used for sending government to citizen messages for circulating its promotional messages. Why did it do so? Both financial considerations and targetting a maximum reach could have been the motivations. A public interest message reaches all mobile users. Besides, service messages are exempt from the payment of termination charges of 5 paisa per SMS.

The cover story describes the modus operandi and content of this scam in detail. Virtuoso could not have executed the scam by itself without collusion with some officials of the concerned telco, which in this case was BSNL and this must be considered by investigation agencies.

Meanwhile an important policy milestone has been achieved as DoT has accepted Trai’s reccommendations related to spectrum assignment for metro and regional trains. Spectrum of of 5 MHz (paired) in 700 MHz band will be assigned to National Capital Region Transport Corporation (NCRTC) for train control system for Regional Rapid Trans System (RRTS) Corridors along the railway tracks.