India Mandates Caller-ID Apps to Share Spam Reports with Telecom Companies

India has enacted new regulations requiring caller-ID and call-management applications to share spam reports with telecom providers, a move that Truecaller has criticized as anti-competitive.

On September 15, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) announced amendments to the regulations governing commercial communications. These amendments mandate that call-ID and call-management applications—tools that allow users to report spam or unwanted calls—must transmit these reports to a blockchain-based system managed by telecom operators. This system is designed to track commercial communications and enforce anti-spam measures.

According to TRAI, the intention behind this regulation is to enhance the dataset of spam reports available for actions against spammers, effectively linking user-reported instances with the telecom sector’s enforcement framework.

However, Truecaller, a leading app in the spam-blocking space, expressed its concerns to TechCrunch, describing the requirement as a “one-way exchange” that unfairly directs commercially valuable data from such applications to telecom companies.

India is a crucial market for Truecaller, accounting for over 350 million of its more than 500 million monthly active users globally. The Stockholm-based company utilizes a combination of community reports and automated detection to identify and mitigate spam calls.

This regulatory change takes place amid rising incidents of spam and fraudulent calls in India. Truecaller reported that its users faced approximately 42 billion spam calls throughout 2025, which included calls that were blocked, labeled, or ignored. Furthermore, the app managed to block nearly 12 billion spam calls during the same year.

This is not the first dispute between Truecaller and the Indian regulatory body regarding spam call management. The company previously opposed restrictions that prevented call-management apps from automatically labeling calls from specific government-designated number ranges as spam, arguing that such exemptions could allow unwanted calls to bypass their filters.

The recent amendments maintain those restrictions, disallowing call-management applications from broadly blocking or filtering calls from designated number series used for promotional, service, and transactional purposes. Users still have the option to manually block such calls on their devices, as noted by the regulator.

“Our data and user feedback clearly indicate that spam has surged due to these loopholes for spammers, but we have complied with this since late last year,” stated a representative from Truecaller.

Sumeysh Srivastava, a partner at the consulting firm The Quantum Hub in New Delhi, emphasized that these new amendments bridge two distinct layers: while telecom operators furnish the fundamental network and the blockchain-based anti-spam infrastructure, caller-ID applications work on top of this network to filter and identify calls.

Srivastava also raised technical and jurisdictional concerns, such as the standards for reporting that apps will need to adhere to and how compliance will be enforced against companies that aren’t telecom operators.

Earlier drafts had proposed using India’s IT laws to enforce these mandates. However, Srivastava noted the final announcement did not clarify whether this enforcement mechanism would be included in the rules.

The extent of the information that apps will be required to share under the new regulations remains ambiguous. Kazim Rizvi, founding director of the think tank The Dialogue, pointed out that mandating an app to transmit specific spam reports is significantly different from requiring it to share wider datasets or analytics systems utilized for identifying suspicious calls.

Rizvi indicated that the regulations need to offer clarity on several aspects, including the type of information that must be shared, how users will be informed or asked for consent, and how the data can be retained and utilized thereafter.

As of now, TRAI has not responded to inquiries regarding the specific data that apps would be obliged to share, nor whether these rules will be applicable to spam-reporting features embedded within smartphone operating systems like Android and iOS.

New Regulations for AI-Driven Calls

These amendments also tackle the increasing use of software and AI voice agents for making calls. Automated calls, where a human does not directly dial a number, will now fall under TRAI’s application-to-person (A2P) framework. This encompasses robocalls and those employing pre-recorded or synthetic voices.

Entities utilizing such technology must disclose their usage and the corresponding phone numbers to telecom operators beforehand. A2P calls that have not been declared will be classified as spam, according to TRAI.

The primary criterion, as described by Srivastava, is the initiation method of the call, rather than solely the use of an AI-generated voice, which introduces some uncertainty around AI-assisted calls that involve human input.

Former TRAI secretary, Satya N. Gupta, noted that the new rules do not prohibit businesses from utilizing AI or automated calling technologies; they only require disclosure of such usage to telecom operators.

Telecom providers will have the authority to impose a termination fee of up to 5 paise (approximately $0.052) per minute on A2P calls, although calls made from certain designated number ranges will be exempt from this charge.

Rizvi highlighted that the revised criteria may also encompass calls made through software, even when a human is involved, such as those from contact centers and click-to-call services. “Without that specification, the A2P category could become broader than what regulatory measures seek to address,” he asserted.