Truecaller has gone on the offensive against India’s telecom regulator, accusing it of undermining the very anti-spam regime it is trying to build. The caller ID company says restrictions imposed by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India are weakening consumer protection in the country that accounts for most of its users.

At the heart of the dispute is India’s dedicated numbering system for commercial calls. Authorities carved out the 1400 series for telemarketing and the 1600 series for service and transaction-related calls, arguing that clear segregation would help people distinguish legitimate business communication from scams and nuisance calls.

Truecaller chief executive Rishit Jhunjhunwala says the policy has backfired. He claims TRAI has barred caller ID apps from labeling numbers in those series as spam, even when they are repeatedly reported by users. According to internal data he shared, Truecaller users now ignore the vast majority of calls from those ranges, with more than four in five 1400 calls and nearly as many 1600 calls going unanswered. Over eight months, users manually blocked tens of millions of such calls, and blocking of 1600 numbers has surged.

Unable to tag those calls as spam, Truecaller has resorted to a workaround: a “Frequently Blocked” badge that appears when many users have rejected the same number. The company argues this is a compromise forced by regulation, not a technical limitation.

The clash escalated after reports that TRAI had sought powers under India’s Information Technology Act to act against caller ID services such as Truecaller, Hiya and Whoscall if they flag 1400 or 1600 numbers as spam. That move would effectively give the regulator direct leverage over how these apps classify commercial calls.

For Truecaller, the stakes are unusually high. India is its largest market by far, with hundreds of millions of monthly active users relying on the app to screen calls in a country plagued by fraud and aggressive telemarketing. Indian authorities themselves have highlighted the scale of the problem, citing millions of disconnected fraudulent numbers and enforcement actions against thousands of entities.

Jhunjhunwala says the company will submit its data to India’s IT ministry and is urging regulators to base any new rules on evidence. His message is blunt: go after the abusers of the system, not the tools that help people avoid them.