Not receiving bank OTP on SMS? Here’s why

New Delhi, Mar 10: Are you worried about not receiving bank, LPG one-time passwords (OTP) through SMS in your box? Hold on, you are not alone. Over the past three days, several users have flooded social media, highlighting chaos, affecting daily life.

People were reported to struggle affecting everything from CoWIN registration OTPs, bank OTPs for debit card transactions bank transfers and while making purchases on e-commerce platforms such as Paytm and several others.

Also, as per an ET report the Aadhaar authentication for services also suffered. "We are unable to reach authentication service to serve you OTP. Please try again later," said a statement on the official Aadhaar website. This has been faced as the new TRAI's proposed SMS regulation moved into its second phase from Monday (March 8, 2021). Nonetheless, implementation of these regulations caused disruption in banking and e-Commerce OTP services.

The newly imposed SMS regulation by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) could be the reason behind it. The implementation of these guidelines believed to have disrupted OTP services.

New TRAI Rules

In February 2021, the Delhi High Court ordered TRAI to put into place Telecom Commercial Communication Customer Preference Regulation (TCCCPR) that was designed to stop the problem of 'unsolicited commercial communication (UCC) or spam call and messages', as per the Hindu report.

The guidelines were enforced such that the use of illicit SMS headers by scammers for cheating customers can be stopped. SMS headers is a combination of six characters that represent the company name of the message sender. And as per the latest TRAI guidelines, each of the SMS should be verified before it is delivered.