Bangkok (VNA) – Thailand's Digital Economy and Society (DES) Ministry has introduced a draft bill aimed at better protecting people from online scammers.
Under the proposed legislation, mobile phone service providers and banks will be held accountable for negligence by allowing their clients to be cheated, tighten controls on the sending of short messages with links attached and further limit the ownership of telephone SIM cards.
DES Minister Prasert Chantararuangthong said the draft seeks to amend the Cyber Crime Decree and is now being scrutinised by the Council of State.
The draft bill also seeks to increase the penalties for those who sell the personal information of their clients without their consent, from one-year in prison to five years.
It will also require mobile phone service providers to keep a close watch on callers who make more than 100 calls a day from the same phone numbers and to restrict the ownership of SIM cards only to five per person.
Senders of short messages with links attached will also be asked to register with service providers to prevent scammers from cheating people with fake messages.
According to the ministry, more than 739,000 complaints of online fraud were filed with the police between March 1 and November 30 this year, with the amount of losses estimated at over 77 billion THB (2.2 billion USD)./.
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