UK watchdog announces rules to stop scammers in their tracks

Ofcom, the UK communications watchdog, is establishing new rules to help businesses and individuals fight messaging scams.

One hundred million potentially fraudulent messages were reported to mobile providers last year, according to statistics from Ofcom.

Now, the communications watchdog is setting up rules that are designed to “block, limit, and disrupt mobile scammers.”

Bad actors easily exploit mobile providers, allowing them to send scam messages at scale.

Usually, scammers send messages prompting victims to pay a fee or share their sensitive information, which can then be exploited by threat actors.

Roughly half of UK mobile users reported receiving fishy messages between November 2024 and February 2025.

These fake messages were usually received via Apple’s iMessage or just SMS, Ofcom said in a report.

To mitigate message scams, Ofcom has announced a new set of rules mobile service providers must follow to stop scammers.

The watchdog proposes that mobile service providers set a limit on how many messages a pay-as-you-go SIM card can make.

Recently, a SIM farm comprised of 75,000 SIM cards was disrupted in Lithuania. Over 200 SIM boxes, 100 computers, and over 75,000 SIM cards were seized by authorities.

SIM farms are generally made up of pay-as-you-go SIMs and used to send scam messages en masse.

So, if mobile service providers put a cap on how many messages they can send at a time, this would render SIM farms useless.

Alongside blocking numbers used by scammers, Ofcom proposes that mobile providers block scam messages in transit by detecting malicious sender IDs, weblinks, and phone numbers.

Mobile service providers should also “conduct upfront and ongoing due diligence checks, prevent the use of fake sender names, apply incident management processes, and block scam messages in transit,” Ofcom advises.

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