Why Truecaller can't label 1600, 140 calls as spam: TRAI explains

India's telecom regulator on Friday defended rules governing designated phone number series used for banking, financial and government calls, saying such numbers cannot be tagged, filtered or blocked by call management apps.

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) said some media reports and public comments on the 1600 and 140 number series could lead to "misinformation or misinterpretation" of the regulatory framework.

The clarification follows criticism by Truecaller Chief Executive Rishit Jhunjhunwala, who said the regulator's proposed curbs would prevent the app from warning users about community-reported spam calls originating from those number series.

TRAI said the 1600 series is reserved for service and transaction-related calls made by banks, insurers and other financial institutions regulated by the Reserve Bank of India, the Securities and Exchange Board of India, the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India, and the Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority.

The series is also used for government-to-citizen communication.

"A key objective of assigning designated series for these important communications is to make such calls trustworthy for the customers/citizens," the regulator said.

Under the Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference Regulations (TCCCPR), calls originating from the 1600 series cannot be tagged, blocked or filtered, it added.

The regulator also reiterated that the 140 series has been designated exclusively for promotional calls by entities across sectors.

“Entities desirous of availing 140 series number for making promotional calls must register with Telecom Service Providers under the TCCCPR framework and comply with the provisions of the regulation,” it said.

According to TRAI, consumers can choose whether to receive such calls by registering their preferences on the national Do Not Disturb (DND) registry. Those who opt out of promotional calls from selected sectors will not receive 140-series calls from those sectors.

However, the regulator said call management apps cannot tag or filter 140-series calls either, except where calls are blocked in accordance with a customer's DND preference.

The regulator said such tagging could mislead customers who have chosen to receive promotional calls from a sector.

The clarification comes after reports that TRAI has sought authorisation from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology to regulate call management applications as part of its effort to curb spam and fraudulent calls.

TRAI has separately proposed amendments to commercial communications rules that would prohibit call management apps from tagging, blocking, filtering or otherwise altering calls originating from designated commercial communication number series.

Jhunjhunwala, in a social media post, said that while the intent to issue designated series might sound good on paper, there has been a huge increase in spam calls through 140 and 1600 number series.

"Truecaller has actually helped hundreds of millions of Indians every single day for 17 years, and now they want to censor/suppress trusted information from people? …What happened was that the number of spam calls made through the 140/1600 number series skyrocketed! Over 51 million calls from both series go unanswered every single day," he said.

He said there is a massive increase in the number of reported spam and scam calls by the Truecaller community, even though the app is now allowed to show them.

"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 a lack of trust. In the past 8 months, Truecaller users have ignored 81 per cent of all 140-series calls and 79 per cent of all 1600-series calls," Jhunjhunwala said.

He said some of the calls are, of course, legitimate, 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 (up by 208 per cent) 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," Jhunjhunwala added.

He said that at present Truecaller users actively block 4 lakh calls from the 140 series and 1.25 lakh calls from the 1600 series every 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)," Jhunjhunwala said.

He said TRAI’s request to the government for seeking authorisation 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. Penalise the bad actors, not the ones like Truecaller that make a significant positive impact," Jhunjhunwala said.