UK communications regulator Ofcom officially published new anti-fraud rules on 15 July 2026. It establishes tiered prevention and control rules for P2P person-to-person SMS and A2P commercial SMS to address the serious SMS telecom fraud crisis in the UK. Compliance obligations for A2P services will take effect on 15 July 2027.
Statistics show fraud accounts for 45% of all reported crimes in England and Wales. In 2025, the public suffered £1.28 billion in losses from fraud, and 40% of mobile users received suspicious SMS messages within the prior three months. The new rules impose mandatory requirements separately for P2P personal messages and A2P commercial messages. For P2P SMS, mobile operators must gather intelligence on fraudulent numbers and malicious links, block scam numbers and fraudulent content, and set message volume caps for prepaid SIM cards to curb mass scam messaging from SIM farms.
For A2P commercial SMS, mobile operators and SMS aggregators are bound by rigid compliance duties: they must implement KYC customer due diligence and continuous KYT traffic monitoring; strictly verify alphanumeric Sender IDs to prevent fraud through impersonation of corporate identities; build incident response workflows to block scam SMS in transit, with liability for parties failing to fulfil review obligations. Ofcom also released accompanying guidance requiring operators to handle scam calls from overseas spoofed UK numbers and withhold caller ID for suspicious incoming roaming calls.
Complementing the UK ban on SIM farms and the Telecom Fraud Industry Charter, these new rules aim to stop scam SMS distribution at source and protect consumers and enterprises.
