TRAI Orders Truecaller To Stop Spam Labels On Official Calls

India’s telecom regulator TRAI has directed apps like Truecaller to stop showing spam warnings on 140-series (telemarketing) and 1600-series (banking) calls. These special numbers are meant for legitimate business use. According to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), user reports were blocking important calls. Truecaller followed the rule but claims over 51 million such calls now go unanswered daily.TRAI is seeking legal powers under the IT Act to control such apps. The row shows the difficulty of fighting spam while protecting real calls. India sees billions of spam calls yearly.In response, Truecaller has blamed TRAI for the sharp rise in spam calls, suggesting that the organisation's mandate preventing apps from displaying community

spam warning on 140 and 1600 series numbers has eradicated customer trust and ultimately benefitting the scammers. Furthermore, the caller identification platform has also pushed back against reports that TRAI is looking to get the power to regulate the caller ID apps in the country. The Chief Executive Officer of Truecaller, Rishit Jhunjhunwala, said the firm has agreed and accepted the directions by TRAI and is whitelisting dedicated number series despite questioning whether the regulator had the authority to issue these kind of instructions in the first place. He wrote, 'Over 51 million calls from both series go unanswered every single day.' Jhunjhunwala also said that Truecaller was mandated not to tell our users that those calls are spam.His remarks dropped a day after the reports related to TRAI asking for permission to regulate caller ID apps started to make headlines. According to the data shared by Truecaller, users have manually blocked more than 74 million calls from the two series, including 140 and 1600. On a day-to-day basis, users block around four lakh 140 series and around 1.25 lakh 1600 series calls as well. Truecaller has said that they will be sharing the data with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. Their data shows that restricting community generated information on the caller Id platform has decreased consumer trust and mad it easier for spammers to exploit the series.