Truecaller now lets you hang up on scammers — on behalf of your family

Caller identity platform Truecaller recently launched a new feature that allows one person to become an admin of a family group, receive alerts about fraud calls received by other members, and even end a call on their behalf if they suspect a family member may be being scammed.

The company, which has more than 450 million users, first launched the feature in December in a handful of countries including Sweden, Chile, Malaysia and Kenya. Truecaller said that after seeing promising results, it decided to roll it out globally, including in India, the company’s largest market. The feature is free and users can create groups even if they don’t have a paid Truecaller subscription.

This feature allows the tech-savvy member of a family or friend group to become an administrator of a group with up to five members. Once the other members join the group, the administrator can receive alerts about potentially fraudulent calls these members receive. If the administrator believes the call could be harmful to the member, he/she can also end the call remotely. While the admin can get alerts for fraud calls when a member is on iOS or Android, they can only end calls for members on Android.

On Android, members can also give the admin permission to detect real-time activities such as walking or driving, the phone’s battery level, and sound settings (to check if the phone is in silent mode). Truecaller said this is useful for administrators to keep an eye on older members and only call them when they are not walking or driving.

The administrator can also block certain numbers and international calling codes and share a block list with group members.

Truecaller noted that the administrator cannot see the non-spam call history or text message history of group members.

“I think, unfortunately, we all know someone in our family or friends who has been affected by fraud,” Kunal Dua, Chief Product Officer at Truecaller, told TechCrunch during a call. “In that sense, it’s a fundamental shift for Truecaller in terms of what we’ve been focusing on as a problem,” he added.

Last year introduced Truecaller a voicemail feature for Indian users with an AI assistant that listens to calls when a user is unavailable and provides a summary of the transcript. The company is exploring a similar AI approach to family protection to potentially alert the administrator about what type of fraud call a group member is receiving.

The company is also exploring using AI to screen calls and automatically disconnect them when certain words associated with scams are detected, such as “digital arrest” – a tactic in which perpetrators pose as law enforcement officers to extract information or money from call recipients.

In India, scam calls have increased over time and have caused financial losses across the country. Truecaller said it identified more than 7.7 billion fraud calls last year. The Indian authorities have started several initiativesincluding one controversial policy SIM binding, which could hinder the operation of apps such as WhatsApp and Telegram.

Truecaller is facing headwinds. The stock has shrunk by more than 80% in the past twelve months. In its fourth-quarter 2025 report, the company said EBDITA – a measure of operating profitability – fell 49% year-on-year, while advertising revenue fell 31%. The company is also facing challenges from India Caller Name Presentation (CNAP) system, which displays the caller’s name as registered with their telephone company. Truecaller has insisted that merely displaying the caller’s name will not reduce spam calls, arguing that the platform goes further by offering community-based reporting.

“There has been a lot of talk in India about the upcoming rollout of CNAP,” Truecaller CEO Rishit Jhunjhunwala said during the Q4 2025 earnings call. “CNAP has been partially rolled out and so far the impact on our user growth has been limited. As we have said in the past, we expect CNAP to have some impact on user growth, but that remains to be seen if CNAP reaches a full rollout.”

Jhunjhunwala continues, “Our focus remains on delivering a superior product, and as you know, the consumer can choose to use CNAP and Truecaller in parallel, where we provide much more information and much more context and various other solutions for the consumer.”