The long-awaited measure arrives this October 1st

Telephone scams have become a real scourge for consumers, invading their daily lives with unsolicited calls at any time of the day and increasingly sophisticated fraud attempts. Whether for fake promotional offers, non-existent services or supposed administrative procedures, scammers are always competing in ingenuity to deceive the most vulnerable. Faced with these incessant calls, victims often feel helpless, even though they have put certain measures in place to protect themselves.

To protect them, a brand new system will soon be deployed in France to prevent scammers from spoofing the numbers of banking institutions or public bodies. This technique, called “spoofing”, is generally used to make a fake phone number appear that seems credible on their victim’s screen. By using this process, they can pretend to be a local number, an official customer service, or even a government institution, making the call more credible. This allows them to deceive the person in front of them and gain their trust more easily. The goal is often to extract personal or financial information.

As of October 1, 2024, this practice should be a thing of the past since the authorities have developed a new security protocol to filter calls. This project follows the adoption in July 2020 of the Naegelen law, which aims to regulate telephone canvassing. Concretely, telecom operators will now have to verify the origin of calls before the communication reaches the recipient. To do this, they will have to rely on the protocol called the Number Authentication Mechanism (MAN), which contains a database of legitimate numbers. If the number in question is not listed, the call will be interrupted before it even rings the phone. The recipient will not have to do anything, and will not even notice anything.

Of course, such a device requires resources and time to be fully operational. “It took a long time and was very complicated to implement, and required a lot of investment, both technical and human, from the operators,” explained Romain Bonenfant, general director of the French Telecoms Federation, to our colleagues at Figaro. Above all, it is a complex system to install. Therefore, there will be several phases. “On October 1, we will begin testing cuts on unauthenticated landline-to-landline calls excluding copper lines,” the expert explained. In the future, the device will be extended to the mobile network.