A complaint center will be established to shut down online cockfighting operations, also known as e-sabong, and put a stop to text scams, the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) said Sunday.

Information and Communications Technology Secretary Ivan Uy said that they will also set up a task force or a call center where people can report their complaints to help the agency monitor illegal activities better.

“One the first tasks that perhaps I will do is to set up perhaps a central complaint center. Either a call center or contact center where we can consolidate these complaints and where they forward the numbers so we can act on it,” Uy told dzBB.

Uy said it would be useless to block numbers that spread these text scams or operate e-sabong as the DICT did before, since the offender would just change numbers.

He said DICT will be coordinating with law enforcement agencies to help arrest them and discourage them from repeating their actions.

Uy said that to ensure that telecommunication companies provide quality internet service, they will be publishing a public scorecard that rate their service on websites or media outlets every month.

Telcos that have low scores could be penalized, he added.

“What’s more important is that because we are going to publish the score card in public websites or media outlets, the telcos will be forced to monitor (their internet service). It will be bad for their marketing if they are the lowest on the scorecard every month,” Uy said.

"In some areas, the problem really is a lack of towers for cellsites. It takes a long time to set them up and invest in them. And there are requirements for that, especially the permits in the local government units (LGUs)," he added.

He said DICT will coordinate with the Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG) and the local government to identify if the problem is with the LGU or the telecommunications firm so they would not be blaming each other.

The scorecard system could also apply to LGUs that are not processing the application of telcos to set up towers for cellsites, he added. Jaspearl Tan/DMS