Truecaller launched a free web and Android tool called Scam Checker on Sunday, letting users in India paste a suspicious phone number, link, or message to check if it's fraudulent. The service taps into the company's crowdsourced ScamFeed community reports - built over more than a decade of operating a caller ID business that now serves over 500 million users - and requires no app download or sign-in. It marks the Swedish company's first major move to bring scam intelligence directly to the open web, as fraud increasingly shifts beyond voice calls to messaging apps, SMS, and links.
CEO Rishit Jhunjhunwala told TechCrunch that the tool was shaped by user behavior. "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?'" Jhunjhunwala said. "What people do in that moment is search." Truecaller estimates roughly 14 million web searches a month are made to verify suspicious links and numbers.
How Scam Checker works
The service processes submitted links by expanding shortened URLs and following redirects to the final destination. It then checks these against Truecaller's proprietary risk database and other fraud signals. Users can also paste an entire suspicious message, and the tool will extract any phone number or link to surface related community reports. More detailed information - such as the name associated with a phone number - remains locked behind Truecaller's existing sign-in service.
Scam Checker is free to access and will expand from India to Latin America, the Middle East and Africa, and Southeast Asia. The company said about 20,000 scam reports are live on ScamFeed in India, with around 1,300 new reports added each week. Globally, Truecaller evaluated 12.9 billion messages between September 14 and 20, flagging 20.3 million as fraudulent.
Scams move beyond phone calls
The launch reflects how fraud has outgrown traditional voice calls. A 2025 GSMA survey of Indian adults found that 46% of scam victims were approached through messaging apps, 37% via SMS, and 32% through voice calls. Truecaller's community data is becoming central to its detection efforts, and the company plans to broaden the types of scams Scam Checker can identify, including adding screenshot uploads for analysis in the near future.
The push beyond caller ID also comes as Truecaller's core business faces new pressure in India, its largest market with more than 350 million users. Telecom operators are rolling out a government-backed Calling Name Presentation service, while Apple and Google have added their own caller identification and spam-protection features. Last week, India's telecom regulator ordered caller-ID apps to share user-submitted spam reports with operators, a move Truecaller criticized as a one-way exchange.
Jhunjhunwala acknowledged the shift. "Caller ID was the first problem we solved, and it's still how most people find us," he said. "But scams moved to a more multi-channel approach with links and messages, and increasingly to voice and video. Our protection has to follow the scammer."
Why this matters for customer support and frontline professionals
For teams in customer support, finance, insurance, and other client-facing roles, scam verification often falls outside official workflows - an employee gets a forwarded screenshot from a worried customer or spots a suspicious link in a support ticket. Scam Checker offers a no-login way to quickly assess those links or messages without routing through internal security tools that may not be built for this kind of triage. The tool's reliance on community reports also means the fraud data reflects what is circulating right now, not just what was cataloged months ago. That speed matters when a single convincing phishing link can compromise trust with a client.
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