Mr. Richard Walsh:

To give the committee a sense of the scale of the problem, text messages are often followed up with phone calls to landlines. We have started engaging with ComReg and its nuisance communication task force. ComReg has led on a pilot that the banks took part in. It was intended to block any calls that appeared to come from bank call centres. Bank call centres generally will not make outbound calls but spoofers were able to make the call identifier appear as if it were coming from a bank. The trial started in September. ComReg has said that at this stage, mobile operators have blocked approximately 10 million calls. Those are 10 million calls that have not connected. That is only dealing with the one area, that is, the banking sector. There is a big problem. With Internet calls, there is almost no cost to a fraudster to repeatedly make a vast volume of calls.