Every scam leaves a digital signal and we want to share those across borders: GSMA APAC head

Every scam leaves a digital signal and we want to share those across borders: GSMA APAC head

Julian Gorman, Head of Asia Pacific at the GSMA, said the telecom industry is working to build cross-border collaboration frameworks to help identify and prevent digital fraud by sharing network intelligence signals through APIs.

Speaking at the India Mobile Congress (IMC) 2025, Gorman highlighted that most scams today use mobile networks at some point in their execution, making telecom data a crucial component in the global fight against fraud.

“Lines estimates about 80% of digital scams involve telecom technology at some point,” he said. “Our particular survey, which we published yesterday, shows that romance scams are twice as popular in India as they are in ASEAN.”

He explained that scams vary in structure starting from romance fraud to government impersonation, but all have one thing in common: a detectable digital footprint.

“If you can connect a traffic profile or a piece of data from the network with the anatomy of a scam, you can come up with some sort of risk indicator,” Gorman said. “Exposing that through the data, through an API, helps the ecosystem use it to assess that risk.”

Gorman said telecom APIs could also be instrumental in helping banks and payment companies strengthen their risk models.

“Mastercard, for example, uses something like 200 transaction indicators to assess a risk. If you could increase the accuracy of the risk score by even half a percent, we’re talking hundreds of billions of dollars,” he noted.

He pointed to GSMA’s Open Gateway initiative, which aims to standardise telecom APIs globally allows operators to expose secure, interoperable datasets for legitimate uses such as fraud prevention, security, and innovation.

“The big challenge in the last couple of years… is the real universal alignment,” Gorman said. “The common API is going to really accelerate the ecosystem’s use of this new area of innovation not just at the national level, but the international level.”

Gorman also revealed that GSMA has convened a multi-country task force to promote regional collaboration.
“A task force chaired by GSMA is working across 16 countries in Asia Pacific, with more than 13 agencies and over 30 organisations, including TikTok and Amazon,” he said. “It’s about that collaboration across borders…to compare data points, identify the signatures on each other’s networks, expose those signals, share them, and increase protection.”

He added that while digital connectivity continues to bring social and economic benefits across Asia, it also demands new forms of collective responsibility.

“Governments across the region are working to close the usage gap and get people online because there’s an overwhelmingly good benefit of being connected,” he said. “But the underlying element is digital trust. Making APIs available is about creating an ecosystem that provides a much safer online experience one that people do not have to fear by nature.”

Supporting this view, Rahul Vatts, Chief Regulatory Officer at Bharti Airtel, said that APIs are now being used by Indian operators to tackle the surge in spam and fraud.

“When we were developing our spam protection product, we recognised patterns such as frequent SIM changes, frequent device changes, and manipulation of one-time passwords,” Vatts said. “Those are areas where operators have started testing now like SIM swap, device, and OTP verification—and we are already doing proof of concepts with banks.”

Adding the government’s perspective, Anand Khare from the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) said that frauds in India have surged sharply, costing citizens about Rs 22,800 crore in reported losses last year a 200% increase over the previous year.

“Every fraud that happens anywhere in cyberspace uses a telecom resource whether an internet connection, mobile number, or digital identity,” Khare said. “If this is not controlled in time, the trust that has been built so far in digital transactions will be lost.”