Truecaller’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Rishit Jhunjhunwala on Wednesday criticised the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India’s (TRAI) approach to regulating phone numbers that have 140 and 1600 on them, saying that the regulatory body had blocked Truecaller from displaying any information about them.
The TRAI had assigned the number 140 for telemarketing calls and 1600 for BFSI (banking, financial services and insurance) companies to make service/transaction related calls.
“This might sound good on paper but the problem started when TRAI also mandated @Truecaller to NOT show any community reported spam information, thereby restricting Truecaller to never show any 140 and 1600 numbers as spam,” Jhunjhunwala wrote in an ‘X’ post.
He further stated that the TRAI’s move to ask the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology of India for authority to not show any caller ID details for 140 and 1600 mobile numbers “made absolutely no sense.”
Jhunjhunwala wrote that the increase in spam calls “is only going to get worse” due to this.
He stated that the move to block the display of details from these numbers led to a considerable surge of spam calls from the 140 and 1600 number series.
“Over 51 million calls from both series go unanswered every single day. Also, there is a massive increase in the amount of reported spam and scam calls by the Truecaller community, even though we aren’t allowed to show it. This happened in front of our eyes and we are mandated not to tell our users that those calls are spam,” Jhunjhunwala said.
The Truecaller CEO further stated that this arrangement was a lose-lose situation for everyone involved as users started invariably blocking these two numbers.
“In the past eight months, Truecaller users have ignored 81% of all 140-series calls and 79% of all 1600-series calls,” he said.
This led to many legitimate businesses who used the numbers losing out, as Truecaller would have otherwise given them the verified badge, facilitating their outreach to customers, as per the post.
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“Instead, consumers and legit businesses both lost out. It’s a lose-lose situation for everyone. Specifically with the 1600 series, reserved for service/transaction related calls, we have seen daily blocking actions triple (+208%) since October 2025,” Jhunjhunwala said.
To work around this restriction, the company implemented a ‘frequently blocked’ badge for calls in lieu of marking a call as spam if it is using a 1600 number.
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