The Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office in Brazil has asked for the immediate reinstatement of a regulation that required telemarketing calls to present a phone number beginning 0303. They argue that their constitutional role requires them to comment on matters relating to the national Consumer Protection Code and that the 0303 prefix was a practical way of protecting several consumer rights described within the code. The Federal Prosecutor’s intervention comes after Anatel, the Brazilian telecoms regulator, controversially and unexpectedly repealed its 0303 rule in August 2025. The regulator had previously introduced the 0303 telemarketing mandate to tackle an epidemic of unwanted calls. Anatel even boasted about how successful its 0303 policy had been, but later concluded it was too successful because consumers were routinely blocking or ignoring all calls that used the 0303 number range.
Brazil’s experience with a dedicated telemarketing number range is important because the use of a dedicated range undermines the business case for branded calling, a service that is being aggressively promoted by US firms as a way for telcos to generate new revenues by increasing pick-up rates for telemarketing calls. Brazilian call centers and telcos voluntarily agreed upon a variant of STIR/SHAKEN to serve as a transportation layer for branded calling information because of the anger felt by ordinary Brazilians toward a plague of unwanted telemarketing calls. Anatel initially welcomed this system, now known as “Verified Origin” (“Origem Verificada”), as a complement to the 0303 rule. However, it later decided that Verified Origin is an alternative to 0303, allowing them to repeal the 0303 rule. The Federal Prosecutor rightly pointed out that Verified Origin is not a comprehensive alternative:
CONSIDERANDO que a revogação do uso obrigatório do prefixo 0303, sem a prévia implementação integral da tecnologia substitutiva em toda a rede e para todos os perfis de usuários, cria lacuna de proteção informacional e de transparência capaz de comprometer os direitos dos consumidores à privacidade e à segurança nas comunicações…
WHEREAS the revocation of the mandatory use of the 0303 prefix, without the prior full implementation of the replacement technology across the entire network and for all user profiles creates an informational protection and transparency gap that could compromise consumers’ rights to privacy and security in communications…
Put simply, 0303 can be mandated for all relevant calls but Verified Origin only works for some calls that might otherwise be a threat or nuisance.
The Federal Prosecutor identified the following rights and obligations that were served by a mandatory 0303 prefix:
- the consumer’s right to adequate and clear information about products, services and their suppliers;
- the consumer’s right to be protected from coercive, unfair or abusive commercial practices, including persistent and unsolicited telemarketing;
- the prohibition of unsolicited services being forced upon consumers; and
- the need to protect vulnerable people from exploitative sales practices.
They cited a series of consumer protection groups who also opposed the repeal of the 0303 rule:
- the Brazilian Institute for Consumer Protection;
- the state consumer protection agencies (Procons); and
- several municipal Procons.
The recommendation of the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office is unambiguously framed as an argument about consumer rights versus commercial interests. Debt collection agencies and charities had lobbied against the 0303 rule because it would negatively impact their income. That may be true, but their needs must be balanced against the harm and annoyance caused by a deluge of spam and silent calls that Brazilians received before Anatel introduced a series of regulations to stop abusive telemarketing practices, including the 0303 prefix. Anatel ditched one of their most successful consumer protection rules under pressure from organizations that make many outbound calls, even though the rule was popular with the public. The intervention by the Federal Prosecutor’s Office can hence be interpreted as a bid to boost its popularity.
International observers should devote some attention to the arguments surrounding 0303 and STIR/SHAKEN in Brazil. Prior to the introduction of 0303, Brazilians received more spam robocalls than any other nationality. Brazilian culture and law is unusually receptive to telemarketing but the businesses which profited from telemarketing had gone too far, and were rightly perceived to be abusing ordinary people. Call center businesses volunteered to fund the implementation of Verified Origin because they were desperate to regain some of the trust that was lost. But this reform proved to be too little, too late. After years of abuse, Brazilians decided to ignore every telemarketing call, and were able to do so because of the 0303 prefix. The comms sector is also offering to restore trust in other countries too, but deserves to be challenged about the speed and the extent of the reforms being offered.
A narrative has formed around STIR/SHAKEN and branded calling that is aggressively promoted by US businesses who want to convince other countries to follow their lead. They are not impartial. They ignore that many cultures are far less receptive to telemarketing than the USA and Brazil. Their approach is often depicted as the best way to protect consumers from fraud and nuisance callers. But this is only one side of the argument. The counterarguments receive less attention because they are not so well funded. US businesses lobbied for the introduction of STIR/SHAKEN in Brazil, but nobody is flying from the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office in Brazil to attend telecoms conferences in Europe or the Middle East.
Anatel flip-flopped on its policy towards the 0303 prefix. They first argued that it was so successful that it should be applied to many more organizations that make outbound calls. They then argued it was too successful, and they repealed the 0303 rule in its entirety. This shows there is no indisputably ‘correct’ answer for how regulators should balance the rights of consumers with the objectives of businesses that profit from telemarketing. If governments and regulators only listen to businesses that profit from telemarketing calls then the public will always get more telemarketing calls, even if most of us would prefer to be left in peace.
The formal recommendation of the Brazilian Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office to reintroduce the 0303 prefix can be found here.
