China Telecom, one of China’s three major network service providers, announced that users with no real-name registration by the end of November would be cut off from making or receiving phone calls.
A China Telecom executive, Li Anmin, made the announcement on Tuesday, saying that it applied to both China Telecom landlines and mobile phones, Sohu Tech reported. The company would stop doing outgoing call services for some groups of users without real-name registration in October.
According to Li, in 2016 alone, China Telecom shut down over 20,000 phone numbers, most of which were related to telecom fraud: the main reason the company is asking for real-name registration from its users is to fight against telecom fraud.
To crack down on telecom fraudsters, the Chinese authorities introduced a so-called “strictest ever real-name registration for mobile users” in May, aiming to have all mobile phone users in China registered with real identity information by July 2017.
However, Chinese scammers were somehow still able to carry on their telecom scams. Notoriously, two phone scams in August led to the deaths of two college students who had heart attacks after losing all their tuition funds to telecom frauds. One phone number the scammers used belongs to China Telecom.
In fact, many telecom frauds in China have been using China Telecom’s phone numbers. This might be the reason why the company has brought the deadline of the real-name registration half a year ahead of schedule.
We can predict that it will not be long before the other two network service providers China Mobile and China Unicom make similar moves.
(top image from Pixabay.com)
