Russian Censorship
Roskomnadzor may block up to 7 million gray SIM cards in August
Corporate numbers and hand-bought SIM cards are under threat
From the beginning of August, Roskomnadzor began to require telecom operators to block subscriber numbers with irrelevant personal data (PD). Interlocutors in two operators told Vedomosti about this. Within three days of receiving the list of numbers from the regulator, the company must notify the subscriber. He then has 15 days to update information about himself on the Gosuslug portal, through the operator’s application or in a communication salon. Otherwise, his number will be blocked in accordance with the provisions of the law “On Communications”.
Denis Kuskov, CEO of the Telecom Daily agency, also knows about mass notifications. According to him, operators “are now very actively sending notifications to subscribers about the need to confirm their passport data in order to avoid blocking.”
We are talking about cards that are distributed at the subway without concluding an agreement, or about corporate SIM cards that companies buy in bulk for employees.
According to the law “On Communications”, the mobile operator is obliged to independently verify the accuracy of information about the subscriber before the start of the provision of services, including data on the end users of services, if SIM cards are issued to legal entities and individual entrepreneurs, a representative of Roskomnadzor (RKN) explained to Vedomosti . This requirement has been in effect since 2018.
The operator is obliged to confirm the full name of the client, his date of birth, passport data. Such data can be provided both personally (in a communication salon), and through the Gosuslug system or other state information systems, explained Alexandra Orekhovich, teacher at the Moscow Digital School educational platform.
In addition, in the summer of 2021, a law came into force obliging entrepreneurs to submit information about end users of corporate SIM cards to the ESIA. The RKN received the right to require the operator to block an unregistered number.
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“Roskomnadzor is responsible for monitoring the reliability of information about subscribers entered by telecom operators into their databases. To this end, the agency has developed a special information system that automatically monitors the reliability of such data,” said the representative of the RKN. When connecting to the system, we note the intensification of efforts by operators to independently bring their databases in line with the requirements of the law to combat illegal SIM cards, he added.
“Operators and RKN interact within the framework of the procedure established by law for confirming the data of subscribers and users with numbers of legal entities and individual entrepreneurs,” a Beeline representative said. “The legislation obliges us to suspend the provision of communication services if the client data is outdated and does not match the current ones.” “We inform customers as widely as possible about the need to go through data reconciliation: using SMS, notifications in your personal account or push notifications,” added a Tele2 representative.
“According to Telecom Daily, there are about 6.5-7 million gray SIM cards in Russia, and you can still easily buy a SIM card without a passport from street vendors, for example, at various stations,” says Kuskov. But this figure is decreasing year by year, he knows, for example, two years ago there were about 11 million gray cards.
Kuskov believes that the subscriber base is “whitewashed” precisely thanks to the work of operators. According to him, out of 7 million gray cards, no more than 5% are cards that were originally bought for illegal actions. Most of these SIM cards are corporate cards that have not been properly issued, or “spare” SIM cards purchased to register on Internet services in order to protect themselves from spam in this way, the expert concluded.
The law on communications provides for the possibility of concluding an agreement with an operator remotely, but the conditions for such a conclusion are strictly limited, Orekhovich says. This can only be done through an enhanced electronic signature or through the ESIA, she notes. Thus, when buying a card, for example, on the marketplace, the client receives a card issued to a third person unknown to the client, Orekhovich warns. And in this case, in a couple of months, the client will receive a requirement from the operator to confirm his data, which he will not be able to satisfy, she believes.
At the beginning of April 2023, operators have already begun mass sending push notifications and SMS to subscribers with a request to confirm their personal data in a communication salon or in the personal account of Gosuslug. As the representative of the ILV explained to Kommersant then, the department monitored the reliability of information about subscribers “entered by operators into databases in accordance with the requirements of the law to combat illegal SIM cards.” But until the beginning of August, the regulator did not require blocking numbers, Vedomosti’s sources in operators explain.
According to one of the interlocutors, each request that the RKN began to send contains about 50,000 numbers. If their owners do not confirm their data, then by the middle of the month, the big four operators will have to block a total of about 1 million SIM cards, he says.
On average, each subscriber brings the operator 320-340 rubles. per month (ARPU indicator), estimates industry analyst Alexei Boyko, author of the ABloud62 Telegram channel. “[In the segment] B2B IoT ARPU is usually less, maybe about 100 rubles, but since the figures for such tariffs are not public, it cannot be unambiguously estimated,” he says. Based on this, the one-time losses of operators from blocking SIM cards, whose owners do not update their passport data, can range from 100 million to 360 million rubles. per month, Vedomosti calculated.
423 000 gray SIM cards were confiscated, according to Roskomnadzor, over five years (from 2018 to 2022) in the course of activities carried out jointly with the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Of these, 152,000 in 2022
Subscriber numbers are checked by the subordinate RKN Main Radio Frequency Center (GRC), the second interlocutor of Vedomosti explained. According to him, the SCRC checks the data on subscribers submitted by the operators with the database received from the Ministry of Internal Affairs. “If the corresponding record was not found, or the passport was lost, or the data turned out to be incomplete, the RKN makes a request to the operator, and the latter to the subscriber, and he is given 15 days to clarify,” the source explained. If the data on the number has not been confirmed, the number is blocked by the operator. He must inform the RKN authorities about this. Those, in turn, make a control call to him to check the blocking, the interlocutor says.
In case of non-confirmation of the data, communication services are blocked, and the contract can be terminated by the operator unilaterally, the Beeline representative added. Thus, the subscriber can lose his phone number if, after the termination of the contract with him, someone else takes the vacant phone number, he warned. “In order to avoid the troubles associated with blocking a number, it is better to go through a simple verification procedure,” said a Tele2 representative.
