Spam calls on WhatsApp: Truecaller may soon come to rescue

Called ID and call blocking app Truecaller will soon let users identify spam calls on WhatsApp and other messaging apps.

Currently in the beta phase, the new feature will be rolled out across the globe later in May, Truecaller chief executive officer Alan Mamedi told Reuters.

This comes at a time when several users in India complained about getting missed calls on WhatsApp from unknown international numbers. These calls come from phone numbers that begin with +880 (Bangladesh), +251 (Ethiopia), +60 (Malaysia), +62 (Indonesia), +254 (Kenya), and +84 (Vietnam) among others.

India's telecom regulator, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has asked service providers such as Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel to curb the menace of "unsolicited commercial communication".

Unsolicited Commercial Communication or UCC is a major source of inconvenience to the public and impinges on the privacy of individuals and there has been a consistent focus and drive to implement "UCC detect Solutions" in order to control spam on telecom networks, the regulator said after its meeting with telecom operators in February.

TRAI has directed carriers to use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) based anti-phishing systems to detect spam calls and messages. The regulator has also proposed a framework for sharing UCC data detected by service providers.

Mobile phone users in India get nearly 17 spam calls on average per month, according to a Truecaller report released in 2021. The vast majority, around 93.5%, of all spam in India are sales or telemarketing calls.

As per Truecaller, one of the common scams in the country remains the ever-popular KYC (know your customer) scam where fraudsters pretend to be a bank or digital payment service, asking for user KYC documents as mandated by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).

In November 2022, TRAI released a consultation paper seeking comments from stakeholders on the need to display caller identification on mobile phones. Currently, smartphone users use third-party apps like Truecaller and Bharat Caller ID to identify the calling party's name and mark spam calls. Tech giant Apple has a 'silence unknown numbers' feature for iPhone while Android has a 'caller ID and spam' protection option that allows phone users to mark incoming calls as spam.

Third-party apps, generally, provide name identification services based on crowd-sourced data. However, the crowd-sourced name identity information may not be reliable, in many instances, according to TRAI.

The introduction of the Caller ID facility in telecommunication networks aims to empower subscribers to take an informed decision while receiving an incoming call, and to reduce the harassment of subscribers from spam callers.