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 internet, with no app or sign-in required.
The Swedish firm on Sunday launched Rip-off Checker, a brand new internet 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 studies from Truecaller’s group, ScamFeed. Nonetheless, extra detailed details about a telephone quantity, together with the title related to it, stays obtainable solely by Truecaller’s current service, which requires a sign-in.
The free-to-access instrument will initially be obtainable in India and is ready 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 studies can provide Truecaller a greater view of the scams circulating at a given time. This might additionally assist the corporate with its fraud and threat merchandise offered to enterprises by Truecaller for Enterprise, though Jhunjhunwala stated Rip-off Checker itself is geared toward shoppers.
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 in opposition to its proprietary threat database and different fraud indicators. Customers also can paste a suspicious message, permitting the service to select a telephone quantity or hyperlink and floor associated studies from the Truecaller group.
The launch comes as scams have grown properly past telephone calls to textual content messages, messaging apps, and internet hyperlinks. In a 2025 GSMA survey of Indian adults (PDF), 46% of those that reported being scammed stated they have been approached by messaging apps, whereas 37% through SMS and 32% by voice calls.
Truecaller estimates that folks make about 14 million internet searches a month to test suspicious hyperlinks and telephone numbers, based mostly on its evaluation of search volumes and site visitors to current verification providers. That conduct helped form Rip-off Checker, CEO Rishit Jhunjhunwala instructed TechCrunch.
“Once you want it, you’re normally elsewhere. The hyperlink reveals up on WhatsApp. Your mum will get a message a couple of site visitors fantastic. A pal forwards you a screenshot and asks, ‘Is that this actual?’” Jhunjhunwala stated. “What folks do in that second is search.”
Truecaller’s group is changing into an important piece of its scam-detection effort. The corporate instructed TechCrunch that about 20,000 rip-off studies are dwell on ScamFeed, its crowdsourced feed the place customers can put up and talk about scams, in India, with round 1,300 new studies 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 kinds 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 studies with telecom operators, a transfer Truecaller criticized as a “one-way change.”
In consequence, Truecaller’s focus is evolving past caller ID.
“Caller ID was the primary downside we solved, and it’s nonetheless how most individuals discover us,” he stated. “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 comply with the scammer.”
Once you buy by hyperlinks in our articles, we could earn a small fee. This doesn’t have an effect on our editorial independence.
