Truecaller publicly clashes with India's telecom regulator over anti-spam rules
Truecaller's CEO publicly criticized India's telecom regulator, accusing it of preventing the app from displaying community-reported spam information for calls from designated number series.
Truecaller CEO Rishit Jhunjhunwala has publicly taken on India's telecom regulator, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), accusing it of hindering the app's ability to protect consumers from unwanted calls. In a post on X, Jhunjhunwala claimed that TRAI's rules prevent Truecaller from showing community-reported spam information for calls from the country's dedicated 1400 and 1600 number series. He argued this restriction has enabled abuse of those numbers and eroded trust in legitimate business calls.
The dispute stems from a framework introduced in 2024, under which India's telecom authorities designated the 1400 and 1600 series for commercial communications. Businesses use the 1400 series for telemarketing and the 1600 series for service and transaction calls. TRAI mandated migration to these numbers, saying it would help consumers identify legitimate business communications and curb spam and scam calls.
Jhunjhunwala argued the policy has backfired. Citing internal data, he said consumers have increasingly lost trust in the designated series: Truecaller users ignored 81% of calls from the 1400 series and 79% from the 1600 series over the past eight months. During that period, users manually blocked 74 million calls from the two series. Daily blocking actions against 1600-series numbers have more than tripled since October 2025.
Unable to mark those numbers as spam, Truecaller introduced a “Frequently Blocked” badge to alert users when a number has been blocked by many people.
The public criticism followed a report by The Economic Times that TRAI had sought powers under India’s Information Technology Act to take action against caller ID apps like Truecaller, Hiya, and Whoscall for labeling numbers from the designated series as spam. TRAI and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The clash comes at a pivotal time for Truecaller, whose core caller ID business faces growing regulatory and competitive pressures. India remains its largest market, with more than 350 million of its 500 million monthly active users based in the country. Jhunjhunwala said Truecaller would share its data with the Indian IT ministry as part of the regulatory process, arguing that decisions on caller ID apps should be evidence-based. “Penalize the bad actors, not the ones like Truecaller that make a significant positive impact,” he wrote.
