Airtel's AI filter finds 71 bn pesky calls and 2.9 bn messages till Jan

Bharti Airtel said it had flagged more than 71 billion calls and 2.9 billion text messages as spam as of January this year, since the launch of its artificial intelligence (AI)-based spam filter for users in 2024.

The telecom operator blocked over 800,000 fraudulent links across the network and over-the-top messaging apps such as WhatsApp, and as a result, its users saw a 70% fall in incidence of scams compared to other networks, according to Bharti Airtel's chief regulatory officer Rahul Vatts. The nature of scams have evolved from simple emails to an industrialised action operating out of high-tech call centres, said Vatts, who was addressing Safer Internet India Summit.

"This (scams) is now a very big industry. It's running on very state-of-the-art, high-tech call centres across the borders, and this is really an industrialised action... there is social engineering, digital risks. The financial loss attached to scams globally is $1.03 trillion," Vatts said.


Airtel is using more than 250 parameters to determine patterns corresponding to spam and scam calls.