The UK mobile industry, banking, investment, and the National Cyber Security Centre assembled forces in a bid. To prevent the spiraling use of scam text messages misusing the COVID-19 crisis.

Technical director at the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), Dr. Ian Levy, stated: “We are pleased to support this experiment, which bearing promising results. The UK government’s recent mass-text campaign on COVID-19 has demonstrated the need for such industry collaboration. To protect consumers from this kind of scams.”

The open-ended industry leadership by the Mobile Ecosystem Forum (MEF), Mobile UK, and UK Finance supported by the NCSC. Hence, It is offering a rearguard initiative to classify and block fraudulent SMS texts. Also to safeguard messages from authentic businesses and organizations.

MEF has formed a ‘white list’ which empowers organizations to register and preserve the sender IDs used when carrying out legitimate text messages in an attempt to counter the extensive use of ID spoofing by criminals. Further, The registry restricts the ability of criminals to send messages using the same sender ID as a particular brand or government department, by examining first whether the sender is the officially registered party. 50 bank and government brands currently preserved through the initiative, with 172 trusted sender IDs registered to date.

A blacklist has further built to block messages from sender IDs that have obtained to send scam texts or from unofficial variations that could utilize to impersonate trusted brands and companies in the future. Over 400 sender IDs recognized so far on the blacklist, including 70 related to COVID-19.

Katy Worobec, managing director of economic crime at UK Finance, states: “Banks are uniting forces with other industries and law enforcement to preserve the public from cruel coronavirus scams. We would urge users to be on their guard against criminals misusing the COVID-19 outbreak to commit fraud.”