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If you're fed up with unsolicited calls from companies trying to sell you something, or worse, scammers pretending to be your bank, Spain is about to make your life noticeably easier. From Friday October 17, every commercial call in the country will be required to use a nine-digit number beginning with the prefix 400. Any commercial call that doesn't use it will be blocked by operators automatically.

 

The announcement was made by Digital Transformation Minister Óscar López, who also revealed that the government's anti-scam plan, launched in March last year, has already blocked more than 300 million calls and 26.6 million fraudulent messages since it came into force.

 

The 400 prefix measure is one of two new steps being rolled out in the autumn. The first arrives on Monday September 15, when operators will begin blocking any SMS messages not registered in a database maintained by the National Markets and Competition Commission. In practice, this means you should only receive text messages from senders that have been pre-registered as legitimate organisations. Unregistered aliases will be blocked before they reach you.

 

Together, the two measures aim to close off the main channels through which scammers currently operate, telephone calls impersonating companies or public bodies, and text messages doing the same.

 

The scale of the problem these measures are responding to is striking. In the first six months of this year, the government's cybersecurity helpline 017, a free service anyone in Spain can call, handled 95,064 consultations, almost double the same period last year and roughly equivalent to the entire 2024 total. The most common reason for calls, accounting for 40% of enquiries, was vishing, smishing or phishing, where criminals impersonate a trusted person or organisation to steal information by phone, text or email.

 

Fraudulent investment schemes and cryptocurrency scams have surged, with enquiries about those up sevenfold since 2022. Bank fraud enquiries have quadrupled over the same period.

 

Among younger users of the helpline, the picture is particularly concerning. Sextortion, where someone is blackmailed using intimate images or videos, is now almost as common a reason for calling as online privacy and reputation issues, and cyberbullying has entered the top five concerns for the first time.

The 017 helpline is free, confidential and available to anyone dealing with a cybersecurity issue.

 

 

 

 

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