Important notice for routing Virtual Number calls to Ireland
What is changing?
The NCIT - Nuisance Communications Industry Taskforce, has announced that it is introducing a change which stipulates that Irish networks must block all incoming traffic coming from interconnect trunks outside of Ireland which carries an Irish A number.
NCIT operators are working towards blocking calls from outside Ireland that are using Irish Fixed Line numbers as their CLI by the end of March 2023.
Why have they done this?
This is an increasingly common change being applied in various countries across the World, for example France applied a similar change in 2019. The main driver for this is to reduce the volume of scam calls routing internationally towards Ireland and thus the likelihood of fraudulent calls occurring.
Scam calls and texts are a widespread problem in Ireland. Fraud offences have nearly doubled from 9,219 in 2021 to 17,354 in 2021 and An Garda Síochána have indicated that this increase is largely due to scam communications.
A common tactic used by criminals to defraud victims is to imitate – or ‘spoof’ – phone numbers. In particular, fraudsters based abroad using Irish numbers as their Calling Line Identification (CLI), knowing that recipients in Ireland are more likely to answer. ComReg and the telecoms industry are fighting this fake number fraud and have been working together in the Nuisance Communications Industry Taskforce (NCIT)on interventions to tackle this and other scam communications.
What calls does it affect?
FROM is Irish, PAID is UK – call will be blocked
FROM is UK, PAID is Irish – call will be blocked
