India Orders Caller-ID Apps to Share Spam Reports; Truecaller Calls Rule Anti-Competitive

The platform tracks commercial communications and enforces anti-spam rules. TRAI said the change is intended to broaden the pool of spam reports available for action against spammers, connecting reports collected by apps with the telecom industry’s enforcement infrastructure.

India is Truecaller’s largest market, accounting for well over 350 million of its more than 500 million monthly active users globally. The company uses community reports alongside automated detection and other signals to identify and block spam calls. It argues that the new requirement transfers commercially valuable data from call-management apps like itself to telecom operators.

The rules arrive as India grapples with spam and fraudulent calls at enormous scale. In a February report, Truecaller said its users in the country encountered around 42 billion spam calls in 2025, including calls that were blocked, labeled, or ignored. The company said it blocked nearly 12 billion spam calls during the year.

Truecaller and TRAI have clashed before over how spam calls should be handled. The Swedish company previously objected to restrictions preventing call-management apps from automatically labeling calls from certain government-designated number ranges as spam, arguing that the exemption could allow unwanted calls to escape its filters. Friday’s amendments retain that restriction and bar call-management apps from blanket blocking, filtering, or spam-tagging calls from designated number series used for promotional, service, and transactional communications. Individual users can still choose to block such calls on their own devices, the regulator said.

“While our data and user sentiment clearly show that spam has skyrocketed due to this free pass to spammers, we have been compliant with this since late last year,” a Truecaller spokesperson said.

Sumeysh Srivastava, a partner at New Delhi-based consulting firm The Quantum Hub who leads its telecom-regulation policy work, said the latest change bridges two distinct layers: telecom operators provide the underlying network and run the blockchain-based anti-spam system, while caller-ID apps operate on top of the network to identify and filter calls. That raises technical and jurisdictional questions, Srivastava told TechCrunch, including what reporting standards apps will have to follow and how the requirement will be enforced against companies that are not themselves telecom operators. A March draft proposed using India’s IT laws to enforce the requirement, but Srivastava pointed out that the new announcement did not say whether that enforcement mechanism was retained in the final rules.

It is also unclear how much information the apps will actually have to provide under the updated regulation. Kazim Rizvi, founding director of New Delhi-based policy think tank The Dialogue, told TechCrunch that requiring an app to transmit a specific spam report made by a user is materially different from requiring it to share the broader datasets, reputation signals, or analytical systems it uses to identify suspicious calls. Rizvi said the rules will need clarity on what information must be transmitted, how users are notified or asked for consent, and how that data can subsequently be retained and used. TRAI did not respond to TechCrunch’s questions about what information apps would be required to share and whether the rule would also apply to spam-reporting features built into smartphone operating systems and dialers such as Android and iOS.

The amendments also address the growing use of software and AI voice agents to make calls. Calls made automatically, without a person directly dialing the number, will now fall under TRAI’s application-to-person (A2P) framework, including robocalls and calls using prerecorded or artificial voices. Companies using such systems will have to declare their use and the phone numbers involved to their telecom operators in advance. Undeclared A2P calls will be treated as spam, TRAI said. Srivastava said the key test is how a call is initiated, rather than simply whether it uses an AI-generated voice, leaving some uncertainty around AI-assisted calls that involve human initiation.