Truecaller clashes with India's telecom regulator over anti-spam rules

Truecaller has opened a public fight with India’s telecom regulator over rules governing caller ID apps, saying the country’s anti-spam framework is making it harder to protect consumers from unwanted calls in its biggest market. On Wednesday, CEO Rishit Jhunjhunwala took to X to publicly challenge the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), accusing the watchdog of preventing Truecaller from displaying community-reported spam information for calls from the country’s dedicated 1400 and 1600 number series, a restriction he said had 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 number series for commercial communications, with businesses using the former for telemarketing calls and the latter for service- and transaction-related calls.

TRAI later mandated the migration to the dedicated numbering series, saying the move would help consumers identify legitimate business communications and curb spam and scam calls. The framework was rolled out amid growing concerns over spam and scam calls in India, one of the world’s largest telecom markets, where regulators and telecom operators have rolled out multiple measures to curb fraudulent communications. Last year, the Indian communications ministry said authorities disconnected more than 2.1 million fraudulent mobile numbers and took action against more than 100,000 entities over the preceding year, underscoring the scale of the challenge.

Jhunjhunwala argued the policy has produced unintended consequences. Citing internal company data, he said consumers have increasingly lost trust in the designated number series, with Truecaller users ignoring 81% of calls from the 1400 series and 79% from the 1600 series over the past eight months. During the same period, users manually blocked 74 million calls from the two number series, while daily blocking actions against 1600-series numbers have more than tripled since October 2025, he said.

Unable to mark those numbers as spam, Truecaller instead introduced a “Frequently Blocked” badge to alert users when a number from the designated series has been blocked by many people. The unusually public criticism came after Indian business daily The Economic Times reported that TRAI had sought powers under India’s Information Technology Act to take action against caller ID apps such as Truecaller, Hiya, and Whoscall for labeling numbers from the designated 1400 and 1600 series as spam. TRAI and India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, which would consider any such proposal, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The dispute comes at a pivotal time for Truecaller, whose core caller ID business has been facing growing regulatory and competitive pressures as the company expands into new products and services . India remains its largest market by a wide margin, with more than 350 million of its 500 million monthly active users based in the country, according to the company. Jhunjhunwala said Truecaller would share its data with the Indian IT ministry as part of the regulatory process, arguing that any decision on caller ID apps should be evidence-based.