Costa News Spain Breaking News | English News in Spain.
The new law, which aims to regulate and ultimately put an end to uninvited commercial calls (Order No. TDF/149/2025 from 12 February), came into effect on 7th March. These measures, implemented in stages to combat phishing schemes that manipulate victims with fraudulent phone calls or text messages, are being implemented. They will also enforce identification through specific prefixes on the numbers used for both customer service and uninvited commercial calls.
The main feature of this new system is the assignment of free numbers, including those for customer service, unsolicited commercial callers, and reverse charge automated services. These will have prefixes 800 or 900. The consumer will then be able to easily identify these calls and block them if they need to. The recipient is also able to call back these numbers for free.
This first phase will require telephone operators to implement measures to stop CLI spoofing. CLI spoofing is the use of fake numbers or disguised ones to make it appear that the caller ID belongs to a trustworthy source. It should be possible to block: calls, SMS/MMS/RCS without identification, calls with incoming caller-ID not attributed to a service and calls with numbers that are not in line with the national numbering plan.
These measures aim to protect against telephone spam and cyber fraud, such as phishing and its variants (SMS and mobile messages),’smishing (SMS), and ‘vishing (telephone calls and SMS). According to data from the ministry of the interior, cybercrime cases increased by 313% from 2019 to 2023 in Andalucía alone.
This rule is applicable to all calls received or made in Spain. Use of mobile phone numbers in customer service and to make uninvited commercial calls is officially prohibited from 7th June 2025.
