SMS Sender ID Registration in Australia — Guide

Australians lost almost $18 million to text‑message scams in 2025. Many of those scams pretend to be from a trusted business or organisation.

Coming into effect in Australia on 1 July 2026 are new laws governing the sending of SMS messages, aimed at better protecting people from scam messages on their mobiles. Messages to mobiles get very high cut‑through with the recipient and are much harder to check for legitimacy, because of the way we interact with text messages. You can't, for example, hover over a link to see where it leads, and you can't easily view the headers to find out where a message really came from.

No change for eNudge users

Because of the way eNudge works, there's actually no change for eNudge users — the legislation does not apply to:

sending SMS from a regular Australian mobile number (your own number, or a random one); or
sending SMS from a rented short code.

Those two options are the only ones eNudge provides, so in short, nothing changes for you if you send SMS through eNudge.

eNudge has never supported sending from a name rather than a number, because it's not possible to receive replies to a message sent from an alphanumeric (named) sender. To fully comply with Australian spam legislation, eNudge has always included unsubscribe instructions in every SMS — done by replying with ‘REM’. In other words, to support unsubscribe, SMS messages must be sent from a number, not a name.

Who does the legislation change impact?

The change requires businesses that send text messages from a brand name (for example, “ANZ Bank” or “ATO”) rather than a number to have that name registered on the new SMS Sender ID Register. Telecommunications providers will check against the register and warn recipients if a message isn't from the named sender.

After 1 July, branded SMS coming from an unregistered name will be marked as “unverified” on your mobile phone — so look out for these! To read more, see New rules for businesses sending text messages.