Truecaller built its business by telling people who was calling. Now it wants to help people check suspicious links and messages too, and it is doing so outside its own app for the first time. The Swedish company has launched Scam Checker, a free web and Android tool that lets anyone paste in a phone number, URL or message and see whether it has been reported as fraudulent. No account or app install is needed.
The approach follows how people behave when they receive something suspicious. Truecaller estimates that around 14 million searches a month are made by people trying to check dodgy numbers and links, based on search volume and traffic to existing verification sites. Rather than asking people to open a dedicated app at that moment, Scam Checker sits where they are already searching.
When a user pastes in a link, the service expands shortened URLs, follows any redirects to the final destination and checks the result against Truecaller’s own risk database and other fraud signals. If users paste an entire message, it extracts any numbers or links and shows related reports from ScamFeed, Truecaller’s crowdsourced scam forum. What it won’t reveal without a sign-in is the name linked to a phone number, which remains exclusive to the main Truecaller service. Scam Checker is free, but it also works as a very effective way to attract new users to the app.
That reliance on community reports is both its biggest strength and its weakest point. In India, ScamFeed has about 20,000 active reports, with roughly 1,300 added each week. That’s useful, but modest compared with the volume of scams in circulation, and a new scam will have no reports until someone flags it. Truecaller says it analysed 12.9 billion messages worldwide in one week this month and marked 20.3 million as fraudulent, but those are the company’s own figures and can’t be independently verified.
The service launches first in India, with Latin America, the Middle East and Africa, and Southeast Asia to follow, although no dates have been announced. Plans to support screenshot uploads and more types of scams are also in the works.
The launch comes as Truecaller’s core business is under pressure. India, where it has more than 350 million users, is rolling out a government-backed caller name display service through mobile operators, and both Apple and Google now build caller ID and spam protection into their phones. The telecom regulator has also ordered caller ID apps to share users’ spam reports with operators, which Truecaller has criticised as one-sided. As scams move from phone calls to messaging apps, texts and links, Truecaller is trying to move with them.
