After greater than a decade constructing a caller ID enterprise serving over 500 million customers, Truecaller is now taking the rip-off intelligence it gathered alongside the best way to the open net, with no app or sign-in required.
The Swedish firm on Sunday launched Rip-off Checker, a brand new net and Android service that lets customers paste in a suspicious telephone quantity, hyperlink, or message to search out out if it’s fraudulent. To work, the service surfaces associated experiences from Truecaller’s neighborhood, ScamFeed. Nonetheless, extra detailed details about a telephone quantity, together with the title related to it, stays out there solely by means of Truecaller’s current service, which requires a sign-in.
The free-to-access instrument will initially be out there in India and is about to develop to Latin America, the Center East and Africa, and Southeast Asia, the corporate mentioned.
Along with serving as lead technology for its app, the neighborhood experiences may give Truecaller a greater view of the scams circulating at a given time. This might additionally assist the corporate with its fraud and danger merchandise bought to enterprises by means of Truecaller for Enterprise, though Jhunjhunwala mentioned Rip-off Checker itself is geared 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 may also paste a suspicious message, permitting the service to pick a telephone quantity or hyperlink and floor associated experiences from the Truecaller neighborhood.
The launch comes as scams have grown effectively past telephone 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 mentioned they have been approached by means of messaging apps, whereas 37% through SMS and 32% by means of voice calls.
Truecaller estimates that individuals make about 14 million net searches a month to examine suspicious hyperlinks and telephone numbers, primarily based on its evaluation of search volumes and site visitors to current verification companies. That conduct helped form Rip-off Checker, CEO Rishit Jhunjhunwala instructed TechCrunch.
“Whenever you want it, you’re normally some other place. The hyperlink reveals up on WhatsApp. Your mum will get a message a couple of site visitors advantageous. A good friend forwards you a screenshot and asks, ‘Is that this actual?’” Jhunjhunwala mentioned. “What folks do in that second is search.”
Truecaller’s neighborhood is changing into an important piece of its scam-detection effort. The corporate instructed TechCrunch that about 20,000 rip-off experiences are stay on ScamFeed, its crowdsourced feed the place customers can submit and focus on scams, in India, with round 1,300 new experiences added every week. Between September 14 and 20, the corporate additionally mentioned 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 sorts 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 Title 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 experiences with telecom operators, a transfer Truecaller criticized as a “one-way trade.”
Because of this, 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 mentioned. “However scams moved to a extra multi-channel method with hyperlinks and messages, and more and more to voice and video. Our safety has to observe the scammer.”
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