Truecaller is taking the scam intelligence it gathered over a decade of caller ID and putting it on the open web. The Swedish company on Sunday launched Scam Checker, a web and Android service that lets anyone paste in a suspicious phone number, link or message to find out whether it is fraudulent — no app and no sign-in required. More detailed information about a number, including the associated name, stays behind Truecaller's existing login-walled service.
The tool launches in India first and is set to expand to Latin America, the Middle East and Africa, and Southeast Asia. To work, Scam Checker expands shortened URLs and follows redirects to their final destination, then checks them against Truecaller's proprietary risk database and other fraud signals. Users can also paste a suspicious message, which the service scans for a phone number or link and then matches against related reports from Truecaller's community.
That community feed, ScamFeed, is becoming central to the company's detection effort. Around 20,000 scam reports are live in India, with roughly 1,300 new ones added each week, Truecaller says. Between September 14 and 20, the company says it evaluated 12.9 billion messages globally and flagged 20.3 million as fraudulent.
The push beyond caller ID has an obvious cause. In India — its biggest market, with more than 350 million users — the core business is under pressure: telecom operators are rolling out the government-backed Calling Name Presentation service, Apple and Google have added their own caller identification and spam protection, and India's telecom regulator recently ordered caller-ID apps to share user-submitted spam reports with operators, a move Truecaller criticized as a "one-way exchange."
CEO Rishit Jhunjhunwala frames the web tool as following user behaviour. "When you need it, you're usually somewhere else. The link shows up on WhatsApp. Your mum gets a message about a traffic fine. A friend forwards you a screenshot and asks, 'Is this real?'" he told TechCrunch. "What people do in that moment is search." Truecaller estimates people make about 14 million web searches a month to check suspicious links and numbers. Next, it plans to broaden the scam types Scam Checker can detect and to add screenshot uploads for analysis.
