Thailand’s National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission (NBTC) summarised the results of special operations targeting spam and fraudulent SMS in its 2023 Annual Report. The report supplied real-world data supporting the formulation of Thailand’s subsequent A2P SMS regulatory policies. Statistics show NBTC blocked a total of 79,893 Sender‑Names and 210,699 risky numbers throughout the year; most of these identifiers were used to deliver marketing spam and phishing A2P messages.
In the business context, many scam SMS spoof Sender‑Names to impersonate banks, government agencies and enterprises to defraud the public. NBTC enforced blocking against non-compliant Sender‑Names to stop impersonation at the source of A2P sender identifiers, and shut down scam-related numbers to combat peer-to-peer fraudulent messages. Governance at this stage focused primarily on post-incident blocking, which became the practical driver behind the mandatory Sender‑ID registration under the 2025 Eight Measures to Combat Tech-Enabled Crimes.
Compared with the 2025 new regulations, the 2023 approach centred on post-hoc interception, whereas the new rules adopt proactive controls including mandatory pre-registration, link validation and marking for inbound overseas SMS. The annual report data clearly illustrates the chaos within Thailand’s A2P ecosystem: unregistered sender identifiers were widely abused by cybercriminals, with nearly 80,000 illicit sender IDs blocked within a single year. Given the hundreds of thousands of risky numbers and sender identifiers circulating spam and scam messages annually, NBTC introduced mandatory rules requiring Sender‑Name registration for all A2P services and prohibiting unregistered gateways and SIM‑Boxes from sending SMS, to reduce the volume of scam messages.
The annual report also serves as a reminder for enterprises conducting cross-border A2P business in Thailand: Sender‑Name is the core focus of Thai regulators. Historically, numerous unregistered identifiers were directly blocked. After the 2025 rules took effect, A2P traffic carrying unregistered Sender‑Names will be blocked by operators, substantially increasing compliance pressure on businesses.
