Truecaller faces tighter spam-tagging rules as TRAI wants spam reports shared; company labels move ‘anti-competitive’
The Telecom Authority of India (TRAI) has tightened its framework to curb Unsolicited Commercial Communications (UCC) by incorporating artifical intelligence-based detection of suspected spam calls into its regulations, it announced on Friday.
TRAI is also introducing a consumer appeal mechanism.
Under the new regulations, telecom operators will have to identify numbers that have a high probability of sending spam messages or phone calls, and then they will have to share the information among themselves.
Caller-ID apps won’t be able to blanket-block calls
TRAI has also tightened its regulations when it comes to caller ID apps like Truecaller by barring them from marking numbers as spam which was done by giving users the option to flag calls as spam. This practice will not be allowed to go on unless the data is shared with the Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) platform.
Truecaller and other such apps could, till now, block, filter or mark as spam calls originating from the numbers 1600 and 140.
Although it had earlier said that it complied with the order to unlock calls originating from these numbers, it did introduce a badge that flagged these calls as per feedback from users.
Truecaller, reacting to TRAI’s mandate of having to share spam reports with telecom operators, called the move ‘anti-competitive’ in an interaction with TechCrunch.
“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.
India is the biggest market of the Stockholm-based company, with more than 350 million out of its 500 million monthly active users being based out of India.
As per the company, 42 billion spam calls were made in India in 2025.
TRAI has also defined Application-to-Person or A2P calls as those initiated by an application, a software system, or automated platform without direct human dialling, including autodialling, robocalls and pre-recorded or artificial voice technologies.
Entities using A2P will have to declare beforehand their use and the numbers that will be used to make these calls to their telecom service providers. If calls are made without such declarations, these will be treated as UCC. A termination charge of up to 5 paise per minute has also been introduced for A2P calls, with specified exemptions.
“A2P calls made through any numbering series designated by authority for regulated commercial calls, and authority-authorised calls are exempted from termination charges,” TRAI said.
