Truecaller’s CEO went public in July 2026 with a direct challenge to India’s Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), accusing the regulator of blocking the caller ID app from displaying spam warnings on calls from a dedicated business number series — and, in doing so, enabling the very abuse the rules were meant to prevent.
CEO Rishit Jhunjhunwala posted his criticism on X on Wednesday, targeting TRAI’s restrictions on marking numbers from India’s 1400 and 1600 series as spam. The 1400 series is designated for telemarketing calls, while the 1600 series covers service- and transaction-related communications. TRAI introduced the framework in 2024 to help consumers distinguish legitimate business calls from scams.
Jhunjhunwala argued the policy has backfired. Citing internal Truecaller data, he said users ignored 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 both series, and daily blocking actions against 1600-series numbers more than tripled since October 2025. Unable to label those numbers as spam, Truecaller introduced a “Frequently Blocked” badge as a workaround.
The public dispute followed a report from The Economic Times that TRAI had sought powers under India’s Information Technology Act to take action against caller ID apps — including Truecaller, Hiya, and Whoscall — for labeling numbers from the designated series as spam. TRAI and India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology did not respond to requests for comment.
The stakes are significant for Truecaller. India is its largest market by a wide margin, accounting for more than 350 million of its 500 million monthly active users. Jhunjhunwala said the company would share its data with the IT ministry and called for an evidence-based approach. “Penalize the bad actors, not the ones like Truecaller that make a significant positive impact,” he wrote.
Source: TechCrunch