If there’s one thing we all agree on, it’s that Reject spam callsWhether they’re commercial to try to sell you something, or worse, scam calls are designed to lure you into some kind of scam.
Despite measures imposed by the government, such as telephone anti-scam plans, registration of aliases for SMS or 400 prefixes, spam continues (I am a victim of it myself). And this has forced operators to take action.
The most active in this sense is Telefonica, which blocked more than 200 million fraudulent voice calls in just one and a half years. Last March, also, Movistar and O2 activated ‘annoying calls’ tools to combat commercial calls. And now, it is working on a new functionality that will allow blocking of fraudulent SMS.
Photo: Movistar
Network-level solutions against fraud. Until recently, the task of combating commercial and/or fraudulent calls fell exclusively to the user, but that has changed in recent months. Now, telephone networks (landline and mobile) are able to detect, identify and block such calls.
In Telefonica’s case, measures to block malicious fraudulent calls on the network began to be implemented in March 2025, before the ministry’s telephone and SMS anti-scam plan, launched three months later, went into effect.
Since then, Spanish Telecom has blocked more than 241 million voice calls, representing around 60% of the total number of calls blocked by all operators. This percentage reached 90% in the first anniversary of the anti-scam plan, but slowly its competitors are catching up.
Also against commercial calls. In addition to these measures against fraudulent calls, Movistar and O2 last March activated the ‘Spam Call’ functionality, which alerts you to communications (almost always commercial) that may be considered unwanted. This is very similar to Orange’s ‘call visible’ warning or Digi’s ‘possible spam’ message.
Movistar’s solution allows all these calls to be blocked by default until the customer activates blocking, something that more than 1.2 million people have already done by calling 1551 via the My Movistar app or in the case of O2.
Since the launch of the service in March, Movistar has identified 166 million spam calls and blocked more than 15 million at customer requests, making ‘spam calls’ the fastest adopted feature in Telefónica’s history.
To give you an idea, on a day like today, and as suggested by Xataka, about 40 million calls pass through the Telefónica network, of which 1.1 million are automatically blocked due to fraud, about 550,000 are detected as possibly unwanted calls and about 470,000 are marked as SP. Among all of them, more than 80,000 are blocked so that they cannot access the phone of the client who activated the block. in one day Nothing next.
Photo: Movistar
he cheerful, In the spotlight. The ministry’s anti-telephone scam plan also aims to combat it cheerfulTechniques that impersonate well-known companies and official institutions (such as DGT, AEAT or banks) through text messages to trick users.
Since the regulation came into effect last year, Telefónica has blocked more than 28 million fraudulent SMS, but this is still insufficient. For this reason, for several months now, it has been working on a new functionality to detect SMS with suspicious content that will be available in the coming months.
To develop this tool, Movistar collected the consent of thousands of customers that allows it to analyze the content of SMS to identify potential fraud, learn from it and automatically block it in the future. Put another way, you’re “training” the tool before it’s widely activated.
To respect privacy, SMS content is analyzed anonymously and without data storage. If you wish to give your consent, access the customer area or the Mi Movistar app and access the ‘Manage your Protection’ > ‘SMS’ section from your profile. There you will find ‘Advanced detection of fraudulent SMS’ option.
Cover image Xataka (edited with ChatGPT)
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