In recent years, we have heard quite a few cases where people have been scammed via fraud calls in India and have been victims of identity or financial theft. To avoid such situations, caller ID apps like Truecaller and Hiya started displaying spam calls based on the user information on specific numbers; this helped users avoid such calls.
Well, TRAI (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) appears to shake things up for such caller ID apps. TRAI created 140 and 1600 series number prefixes: 140 means telemarketing and 1600 means service calls from banks and financial companies. The rules were finalised in February 2025, and banks, NBFCs, mutual funds and insurers were given strict deadlines to move to these numbers by early 2026.
Apart from this, last year, TRAI also directed caller ID apps (like Truecaller, Hiya) to whitelist the entire 140 and 1600 series, which means that the apps should not show spam tags or block these numbers based on user information.
Truecaller CEO, Rishit Jhunjhunwala, recently revealed on the X platform that Truecaller complied with this directive, but they witnessed that the amount of spam calls made through the 140/1600 number series skyrocketed, while people stopped answering calls with these numbers due to a lack of trust.
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According to the stats shared, Truecaller users have ignored 81% of all 140-series calls and 79% of all 1600-series calls, even though some of these calls were legit. Meanwhile, a total of 7.4 crore 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 from the 140 series and 1.25 lakh calls from the 1600 series every single day.
Legit businesses were not able to reach out to consumers, and to avoid this situation, Truecaller built the ‘Frequently Blocked’ badge that was displayed on numbers that are blocked by many people.
Reportedly, TRAI is now asking MeitY for the authority to regulate caller ID apps to not show any information at all on 140/1600 numbers. Reacting to this news, Truecaller CEO has said, “This makes absolutely no sense. We are the good actors who are helping hundreds of millions of Indians every single 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.”
