On September 18, India's telecom regulator TRAI amended its anti-spam rules. The new requirement: caller-ID apps like Truecaller must send all user spam reports to a blockchain platform run by telecom operators.
What Truecaller loses
Truecaller has 350 million users in India, more than half its global total. The app uses community reports to identify spam. Now, by law, every report goes straight to the phone companies. Truecaller calls it "a one-way exchange" and "anti-competitive"—the government is forcing it to hand commercially valuable data to the telecom operators, who are also its competitors.
In 2025, Truecaller users in India encountered 42 billion spam calls. Truecaller blocked 12 billion.
The bigger picture
The same rule package also stops Truecaller from blocking calls from certain government-approved number ranges, even if users report them as spam. Individual users can still block manually, but the app can't do it automatically.
TRAI also now requires companies using AI voice bots or automated calls to declare them in advance. Undeclared robo-calls get treated as spam, with a charge of up to 0.052 cents per minute.
The sovereignty question
If a regulator can order an app to hand user data to a third party, who actually owns that data? The user flagged the call. The app collected it. The government took it. You were never asked.