Truecaller has entered a public dispute with India’s telecom regulator over anti-spam rules that affect caller ID apps in the company’s largest market. The Swedish caller identification service says the current framework is making it harder to warn users about unwanted calls, especially from numbers in India’s designated 1400 and 1600 series.
On Wednesday, CEO Rishit Jhunjhunwala used X to criticize the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, or TRAI, saying the regulator has stopped Truecaller from showing community-reported spam information for calls from those number ranges. He argued that the restriction has created opportunities for misuse and has also weakened confidence in legitimate business calls.
The disagreement centers on a 2024 system under which Indian telecom authorities set aside the 1400 series for commercial outreach and the 1600 series for service and transaction-related communication. TRAI later pushed businesses to move to those numbers, saying the change would help people recognize authentic business calls and reduce spam and scam traffic. The policy was introduced as India continued to face a large volume of fraudulent communications, with authorities and operators taking several steps to curb the problem. Government figures released last year said more than 2.1 million fraudulent mobile numbers were disconnected and action was taken against more than 100,000 entities over the previous year.
Jhunjhunwala said the rollout has had unintended effects. Based on company data, he said users have increasingly distrusted calls from the designated series, with Truecaller users ignoring 81% of 1400-series calls and 79% of 1600-series calls over the past eight months. He also said people manually blocked 74 million calls from those two series during that time, and that daily blocking of 1600-series numbers has more than tripled since October 2025. Because the app cannot mark those numbers as spam, Truecaller has instead added a “Frequently Blocked” label when many users have blocked a number from the designated ranges.
Source: techcrunch.com
