After greater than a decade constructing a caller ID enterprise serving over 500 million users, Truecaller is now taking the rip-off intelligence it gathered alongside the way in which to the open net, with no app or sign-in required.
The Swedish firm on Sunday launched Scam Checker, a brand new net and Android service that lets customers paste in a suspicious cellphone quantity, hyperlink, or message to search out out if it’s fraudulent. To work, the service surfaces associated stories from Truecaller’s group, ScamFeed. Nonetheless, extra detailed details about a cellphone quantity, together with the identify related to it, stays accessible solely by way of Truecaller’s present service, which requires a sign-in.
The free-to-access instrument will initially be accessible in India and is about to broaden to Latin America, the Center East and Africa, and Southeast Asia, the corporate stated.
Along with serving as lead technology for its app, the group stories can provide Truecaller a greater view of the scams circulating at a given time. This might additionally assist the corporate with its fraud and danger merchandise offered to enterprises by way of Truecaller for Enterprise, though Jhunjhunwala stated Rip-off Checker itself is aimed toward customers.
To work, Truecaller’s Rip-off Checker checks the hyperlink the consumer submits, increasing shortened URLs and following redirects to the ultimate vacation spot. It then checks these towards its proprietary danger database and different fraud indicators. Customers can even paste a suspicious message, permitting the service to select a cellphone quantity or hyperlink and floor associated stories from the Truecaller group.
The launch comes as scams have grown effectively past cellphone calls to textual content messages, messaging apps, and net hyperlinks. In a 2025 GSMA survey of Indian adults (PDF), 46% of those that reported being scammed stated they had been approached by way of messaging apps, whereas 37% through SMS and 32% by way of voice calls.
Truecaller estimates that folks make about 14 million net searches a month to verify suspicious hyperlinks and cellphone numbers, based mostly on its evaluation of search volumes and site visitors to present verification providers. That conduct helped form Rip-off Checker, CEO Rishit Jhunjhunwala instructed TechCrunch.
“If you want it, you’re normally elsewhere. The hyperlink exhibits up on WhatsApp. Your mum will get a message a few site visitors positive. A buddy forwards you a screenshot and asks, ‘Is that this actual?’” Jhunjhunwala stated. “What folks do in that second is search.”
Truecaller’s group is turning into an important piece of its scam-detection effort. The corporate instructed TechCrunch that about 20,000 rip-off stories are stay on ScamFeed, its crowdsourced feed the place customers can put up and talk about scams, in India, with round 1,300 new stories added every week. Between September 14 and 20, the corporate additionally stated it evaluated 12.9 billion messages globally and flagged 20.3 million as fraudulent.
Within the close to future, Truecaller says it plans to broaden the forms of scams Rip-off Checker can detect and add screenshot uploads for additional evaluation.
The corporate’s push past caller ID comes as its core enterprise faces new pressures in India, its largest market with greater than 350 million customers. Telecom operators are rolling out the federal government-backed Calling Identify Presentation service, whereas Apple and Google have added their very own caller identification and spam-protection options. Final week, India’s telecom regulator additionally ordered caller-ID apps to share user-submitted spam stories with telecom operators, a transfer Truecaller criticized as a “one-way exchange.”
In consequence, Truecaller’s focus is evolving past caller ID.
“Caller ID was the primary drawback we solved, and it’s nonetheless how most individuals discover us,” he stated. “However scams moved to a extra multi-channel strategy with hyperlinks and messages, and more and more to voice and video. Our safety has to comply with the scammer.”
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