Rishit Jhunjhunwala

TRAI is strengthening regulations regarding the identification of trusted calls. 1600 numbers are designated for service and transaction calls from banks, regulators, and government departments. 140 numbers are used for promotional calls from businesses. The goal is to help users more easily identify legitimate calls. Additionally, TRAI is urging stricter measures against apps such as Truecaller and Hiya, stating that these platforms should not tag or block official numbers. This raises the question of whether the focus is on preventing spam or on controlling the information displayed to users. medianama.com/2026/07/223-tr…

Wondering why spam calls have increased SIGNIFICANTLY in India recently? Well, it's actually going to get worse, here’s why: In late 2025, TRAI enforced businesses to call consumers using 140 (for telemarketing calls) and 1600 (for BFSI companies to make service/transaction related calls) number series with the intention to control the calls using these dedicated number series. This might sound good on paper but the problem started when TRAI also mandated @Truecaller to NOT show any community reported spam information, thereby restricting Truecaller to never show any 140 and 1600 numbers as spam. This seemed very strange from our point of view. Truecaller has actually helped hundreds of millions of Indians every single day for 17 years and now they want to censor/surpress trusted information from people? We described this to TRAI as well, because we knew exactly what would happen next… What happened was that the amount of spam calls made through 140/1600 number series skyrocketed! Over 51 million calls from both series go unanswered every single day.
Also, there is a massive increase in the amount of reported spam and scam calls by the Truecaller community, even though we aren’t allowed to show it. This happened in front of our eyes and we are mandated not to tell our users that those calls are spam. Later, we saw more interesting trends: people stopped answering calls from 140/1600 numbers because of lack of trust. In the past 8 months, Truecaller users have ignored 81% of all 140-series calls and 79% of all 1600-series calls. Some of these calls are of course legit, which Truecaller would have displayed with its verified badge and consumers would have answered these calls. Instead, consumers and legit businesses both lost out. It's a lose-lose situation for everyone. Specifically with the 1600 series, reserved for service/transaction related calls, we have seen daily blocking actions triple (+208%) since October 2025. A total of 7.4 crore (74 million) manual blocking actions have been taken against these series
in the past 8 months. The current situation is that Truecaller users actively block 4 lakh calls (400,000) from 140 series and 1.25 lakh calls (125,000) from the 1600 series — every single day. Eventually we said enough is enough. Our mission is to create trusted communication between consumers and legit businesses, so we went ahead and built the ‘Frequently Blocked’ badge. If a 1600 series number is blocked by many people, we surface this information - but we do not mark it as spam (red on Truecaller). Yesterday we read the news that TRAI is asking MEITY for the authority to regulate caller ID apps to not show any information at all on 140/1600 numbers. This makes absolutely no sense. We are the good actors who are helping hundreds of millions of Indians every day, including the vulnerable elderly, to have a trusted communication experience. Instead, they want to enable bad actors and give them an open playground to spam and scam us by censoring community information. We find this unacceptable. Penalize the bad actors, not the ones like Truecaller that make a significant positive impact. We trust the system and its process and we will share all the data with MeitY (like we have with TRAI) that proves the above statements, to make sure they make a data driven decision in the future. Thanks for reading. Nothing will deter us from helping you avoid spam and scam calls. 💪

Further to what I wrote earlier, TRAI has issued a press release, reiterating that 1600 and 140 series calls cannot be marked as spam by anyone. This is exactly what is leading to the surge in spam from those series! The data proves without a doubt that spammers are abusing this directive. Why not let us mark numbers from these series as spam if 5.25 lakh people are telling us that it is spam, every single day? TRAI press release here: pib.gov.in/PressReleasePa…

@rishj Rishitjee valid point. 1600 series call received as service call but caller behind this to offer loan, increase in credit, etc Same condition in SMS header you find “S” but sender use for promotion. this sender multiple SMS @Airtel_Presence say 1st violation @TRAI

@rameshsrivats I came to India a week ago and realised my name was displaying differently for others. Came to know CNAP was effective since last year. Asked #Vi to fix it and shocked to get a response saying use Truecaller a 3rd party app to update it. Why should I when it’s #Vi to fix?