Industry Focuses on Telemarketing and Online Abuse in India at Two M3AAWG-Hosted Meetings

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Jul 17, 2014) - Two M³AAWG anti-abuse events in New Delhi, India, this July will focus industry efforts on protecting consumers against both telemarketing and cyber exploitations. The Messaging, Malware and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group is co-hosting a roundtable on call center fraud with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission followed by its third M³AAWG India Anti-Abuse Working Group meeting the next day. New industry text messaging best practices for mobile operators will also be released during the working group event. 

"India has one of the fastest growing online populations in the world and is facing many of the same challenges of uncontrolled malware, diverse cybercrime and mobile abuse that the global Internet community has been fighting for years. These meetings are an opportunity to support the local industry's anti-abuse efforts and share our members' experience and the best practices we've developed in response to many of the same threats," said Chris Roosenraad, M³AAWG Chairman.

The call center roundtable, Preventing Telemarketing Fraud: A Multi-Stakeholder Response, on July 30 is also being sponsored by the Data Security Council of India and the Indian software association NASSCOM. It will include presentations on law enforcement, business and technical initiatives to identify and block fraudulent telemarketing and robocalls. DSCI CEO Dr. Kamlesh Bajaj will keynote the meeting.

"The FTC continues to bring enforcement cases against telephone fraud scammers. These include cases against call center operators in India for frauds on U.S. consumers. It's clear, however, we need a multi-stakeholder approach to protect consumers over the long term; this public-private sector roundtable will build on ongoing cooperative work with the Indian industry and law enforcement to address these major issues," said Betsy Broder, FTC Counsel for International Consumer Protection. 

The following day, on July 31, M³AAWG will release its M³AAWG Best Practices for Mobile Messaging Providers at the one-day India Anti-Abuse Working Group meeting it is hosting. The new document outlines the latest procedures and approaches to mitigate abuse of text, mobile and application-to-application messaging, such as SMS, MIM and MMS services. 

The vetted anti-abuse working group meeting will also include presentations on caller ID spoofing, a report on Indian cellular carriers filtering of text spam, and sender email best practices challenges. LinkedIn's Kurt Andersen, an active participant in DMARC.org, will present an overview of the DMARC protocol used to protect against domain and brand spoofing in email messages, followed by a tutorial on the technique that he will present at the SANOG conference on August 3, also in New Delhi. 

More information on the India Anti-Abuse Working Group event is available at www.m3aawg.org/india. The website also includes best practices and other industry resources on fighting spam, bots and other online abuse.

About the Messaging, Malware and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group (M³AAWG)

The Messaging, Malware and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group (M³AAWG) is where the industry comes together to work against bots, malware, spam, viruses, denial-of-service attacks and other online exploitation. M³AAWG (www.M3AAWG.org) represents more than one billion mailboxes from some of the largest network operators worldwide. It leverages the depth and experience of its global membership to tackle abuse on existing networks and new emerging services through technology, collaboration and public policy. It also works to educate global policy makers on the technical and operational issues related to online abuse and messaging. Headquartered in San Francisco, Calif., M³AAWG is driven by market needs and supported by major network operators and messaging providers.

M³AAWG Board of Directors: AT&T (NYSE: T); CenturyLink (NYSE: CTL); Cloudmark, Inc.; Comcast (NASDAQ: CMCSA); Constant Contact (NASDAQ: CTCT); Cox Communications; Damballa, Inc.; Facebook; Google; LinkedIn; Mailchimp; Orange (NYSE: ORA) (EURONEXT PARIS: ORA); PayPal; Return Path; Time Warner Cable; Verizon Communications; and Yahoo! Inc.

M³AAWG Full Members: 1&1 Internet AG; Adobe Systems Inc.; AOL; BAE Systems Detica; Cablevision Systems Inc.; Campaign Monitor Pty.; Cisco Systems, Inc.; CloudFlare; Dyn; iContact; Internet Initiative Japan (IIJ, NASDAQ: IIJI); Litmus; McAfee Inc.; Mimecast; Nominum, Inc.; Oracle; Proofpoint; Scality; Spamhaus; Sprint; Symantec and Twitter.

A complete member list is available at http://www.m3aawg.org/about/roster.