Truecaller’s CEO went public with a fight against India’s telecom regulator. The issue? Truecaller can’t label calls from official designated number series as spam — and users are blocking them anyway.
CEO Rishit Jhunjhunwala posted on X, accusing TRAI (the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) of preventing the app from showing community-reported spam info for 1400 and 1600 number series. These are the numbers businesses are supposed to use for telemarketing (1400) and service calls (1600).
The framework rolled out in 2024 was supposed to help. Give businesses dedicated numbers, let consumers trust them. But Truecaller’s data tells a different story. Users are ignoring 81% of calls from the 1400 series and 79% from the 1600 series. Users manually blocked 74 million calls from these two series in just eight months.
Since Truecaller can’t mark them as spam, it introduced a “Frequently Blocked” badge instead. Workaround territory.
This comes after the Economic Times reported that TRAI wants legal powers under India’s IT Act to crack down on caller ID apps for labeling official numbers as spam.
India is Truecaller’s biggest market by a mile — over 350 million of its 500 million monthly active users are in India. So this matters.
Jhunjhunwala says the company will share its data with India’s IT ministry. His argument: any decision should be evidence-based.
It’s a messy situation. The regulator wants clean business numbers that people trust. But if those numbers are actually used for spam — and the app can’t warn users — trust erodes anyway. Neither side looks great here.
