Britain’s biggest phone networks have joined forces in a bid to put an end to crooks bombarding Brits with cold calls from overseas call centres.
BT, EE, Vodafone, Three, Virgin Media O2, Sky, TalkTalk and Tesco Mobile have signed a new telecoms charter with the Home Office and commit to stopping scammers using fake numbers to impersonate banks and government departments.
They will block foreign call centres from spoofing UK numbers within the next year and roll out new call tracing tools to help police identify scam operations.
The agreement, signed at the BT Tower, comes as the scale of fraud continues to climb.
Figures from UK Finance show that criminals stole more than £629m in the first half of 2025, up three per cent on the same period last year. Investment and romance scams recorded the sharpest increases, with losses of nearly £100m and £20m, respectively.
Under these new measures, calls from overseas will be clearly marked as such, stopping bad actors from disguising themselves behind local or official-looking numbers.
Approximately 96 per cent of mobile users decide whether to answer based on the number displayed, according to government data.
New call tracing technology will also provide police with better intelligence on domestic scam operations. Meanwhile, mobile firms have pledged faster support for victims, reducing response times to two weeks.
Fraud minister Lord Hanson said that the government wanted to make the UK “the hardest place in the world for scammers to operate.”
The Home Office stated that the commitments would also enhance data sharing between networks and law enforcement, enabling regulators to identify which providers are failing to prevent suspicious traffic.
The measures come following a sharp rise in AI-enabled scams, with scammers using software to clone voices and generate deepfake videos.
