After more than a decade building a caller ID business that serves more than 500 million usersTruecaller is now bringing the scam intelligence it’s gathered along the way to the open web, with no app or login required.
The Swedish company launched on Sunday Scam Checkera new web and Android service that allows users to paste a suspicious phone number, link or message to discover if it is fraudulent. To work, the service displays related reports from the Truecaller community, ScamFeed. However, more detailed information about a phone number, including the name associated with it, remains available only through Truecaller’s existing service, which requires login.
The free-to-access tool will initially be available in India and will expand to Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and Southeast Asia, the company said.
In addition to serving as lead generation for your app, community reports can give Truecaller better insight into the scams circulating at any given time. This could also help the company with its fraud and risk products sold to businesses through Truecaller for Business, although Jhunjhunwala said Scam Checker is aimed at consumers.
To work, Truecaller’s Scam Checker checks the link the user sends, expands shortened URLs, and follows redirects to the final destination. It then compares them to its proprietary risk database and other fraud signals. Users can also paste a suspicious message, allowing the service to select a phone number or link and display related reports from the Truecaller community.
The launch comes at a time when scams have gone far beyond phone calls and have spread to text messages, messaging apps and web links. in a 2025 GSMA survey among Indian adults (PDF), 46% of those who reported being scammed said they were contacted through messaging apps, while 37% through SMS and 32% through voice calls.
Truecaller estimates that people perform about 14 million web searches a month to verify suspicious links and phone numbers, based on its analysis of search volumes and traffic to existing verification services. That behavior helped shape Scam Checker, CEO Rishit Jhunjhunwala told TechCrunch.
“When you need it, you’re usually somewhere else. The link appears on WhatsApp. Your mother gets a message about a traffic ticket. A friend sends you a screenshot and asks, ‘Is this real?'” Jhunjhunwala said. “What people do at that moment is search.”
The Truecaller community is becoming a crucial piece of your scam detection effort. The company told TechCrunch that around 20,000 scam reports are active on ScamFeed, its crowdsourced feed where users can post and discuss scams, in India, with around 1,300 new reports being added every week. Between Sept. 14 and Sept. 20, the company also said it evaluated 12.9 billion messages worldwide and flagged 20.3 million as fraudulent.
In the near future, Truecaller says it plans to expand the types of scams Scam Checker can detect and add loads of screenshots for more detailed analysis.
Company’s push beyond caller ID becomes its core business faces new pressures in India, its largest market with more than 350 million users. Telecom operators are rolling out the federally backed Calling Name Presentation service, while Apple and Google have added their own caller ID and spam protection features. Last week, India’s telecom regulator also ordered caller ID apps to share spam reports submitted by users with telecom operators, a move that Truecaller criticized as a “one-way exchange.”
As a result, Truecaller’s focus is evolving beyond caller ID.
“Caller ID was the first problem we solved and is still the way most people find us,” he said. “But scams moved to a more multi-channel approach with links and messages, and increasingly voice and video. Our protection has to follow the scammer.”
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