India’s telecom sector operates under a stringent regulatory regime with rigorous, legally binding standards, oversight and enforcement mechanisms. As per GoI, in December 2025, about 40 lakh mobile connections were disconnected, and 1.3 lakh SMS templates used by spammers were blocked by Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) system.

But this is only the telecom sector. Digital communication platforms have remained largely untouched by such scrutiny. In other words, messaging apps, email services and social media (SM) platforms, carrying much larger volumes of person-to-person and business-to-consumer traffic, face none of the corresponding accountability for what flows through them.

The result? Cybercrime has flourished.

This is because fraudsters have exploited this schism, and as guard rails have tightened on calls and SMSes, they have seamlessly moved across calls, text, apps, emails and SM, following one simple rule: go where regulation is weakest and friction is lowest.

Meanwhile, faced with rising consumer harm and increasing regulatory scrutiny, many telecom operators have moved well beyond box-ticking compliance and are working overtime to show their commitment to vanquishing fraud.

AI-driven spam detection, real-time behavioural analytics, malicious link blocking, proactive identification of fraudulent domains and coordinated takedowns deployed at national scale are being employed. But these efforts have also exposed a structural truth: even the most sophisticated safeguards on regulated telecom channels cannot fully protect consumers when fraud is free to flourish on unregulated digital platforms. After all, one cannot firewall a small part of the digital ecosystem and call it security.

This is also reflected in Global Anti- Scam Alliance’s (GASA) latest findings: 86% of fraud attempts in India over the past 12 mths have shifted to popular OTT communication platforms offering messaging and calling features.

This asymmetry has produced predictable outcomes. Criminals migrate to the least governed channels, telecom operators shoulder a disproportionate portion of the responsibility, while consumers remain exposed and increasingly confused about who, if anyone, is accountable. Most damaging of all, trust in the entire communications ecosystem is eroded.

The answer is not to stifle innovation, but we also cannot continue pretending that platforms facilitating mass communication bear no responsibility for their misuse. If a platform functions as a communications utility offering the same service, it must carry its share of obligations.

What we need are baseline, tech-agnostic responsibilities across all major communication channels, traditional and digital alike, including proactive detection of scams, cooperation with network-level threat intelligence, rapid takedown of fraudulent links and accounts, and meaningful accountability for repeat abuse.

Collaboration is also important. Telecom networks sit at a unique vantage point, able to detect patterns across channels and at scale. Digital platforms bring user-level visibility and interface controls. These capabilities should be combined, not siloed. That’s how we will successfully prevent fraud.

What is needed isn’t incremental tweaks or platform-specific firefighting, but a reset in how we think about consumer protection in communications. For India, this is an opportunity to build a platform-neutral communications framework anchored in legislation that imposes baseline, outcome-oriented obligations on scam prevention, intelligence-sharing and a timely response to abuse. Such a framework must shift the focus from what a platform is to what it does.

This is not a radical proposition but a functional one. A platform-neutral communications framework would not burden innovation – it would protect it. More importantly, it would reflect how consumers experience communication today, not as ‘telecom v. digital’ but as a single, continuous system. Without responsibility becoming as seamless as the scams themselves, the system will continue to fail the very people it is meant to protect.

The writer is executive vice-chairman, Bharti Airtel