HÀ NỘI – Five Vietnamese mobile telecommunication enterprises signed a commitment to stop spam messages on Thursday.

The commitment, signed by Viettel, Vinaphone, MobiFone, Vietnamobile and Gtel, will take effect on July 1 this year.

Each network operator has already taken measures to block spam, but only for inbound messages, as there has not been a consistency among operators.

According to the commitment, each network operator will also publish a number for users to report spam.

At the same time, network operators will co-ordinate with the others to identify and share spam messages and create measures to block spam.

Phan Tâm, Deputy Minister of Information and Communications, said that the commitment reflects the determination to stop spam and advertising messages that violate the provisions of Decree 90/2008/NĐ-CP against spams and Decree 77/2012/NĐ-CP.

A new report from the Việt Nam Telecommunications Authority showed that the country had 121.665 million subscriptions at the end February this year. Of these, 115.183 million were pre-paid subscriptions, accounting for 95 per cent.

The number of pre-paid subscriptions in Việt Nam is 1.25 times higher than the global average approximate with those from undeveloped countries.

Under the drastic direction of the Ministry of Information and Communications, operators have locked services and recalled nearly 20 million pre-activated SIMs.

However, there has been a lack of agreement on the criteria for spam identification, spam filtering systems and co-ordination mechanisms to block and filter inter-network spam messages.

Therefore, spam messages are still popular and continue to become more sophisticated and complicated.

The Prime Minister recently signed Decree No 49/2017/NĐ-CP amending and supplementing Article 15 of Decree 25/2011/NĐ-CP dated on April 6, 2011 and Article 30 of Decree 174/2013/NĐ-CP dated on November 13, 2013.

Accordingly, trading pre-activating SIM cards is punishable by a fine up to VNĐ40 million (US$1,760).

Meanwhile, mobile network providers will be subjected to a fine of VNĐ1 million per subscriber if they provide services for customers with fake names and ID numbers.

Network operators will receive fines of VNĐ80-100 million if they don’t ask mobile subscribers to sign contracts and provide information.

A fine of VNĐ180-200 million will be applied if they violate regulations on registering, storing and using mobile accounts’ information. The decree took effect April 24. – VNS