Truecaller Aims To Help WhatsApp Users Combat Spam

Truecaller will soon start making its caller identification service available over WhatsApp and other messaging apps to help users spot potential spam calls over the internet, the company told Reuters on Monday. From a report: The feature, currently in beta phase, will be rolled out globally later in May, Truecaller Chief Executive Alan Mamedi said. Telemarketing and scamming calls have been on the rise in countries like India, where users gets about 17 spam calls per month on average, according to a 2021 report by Truecaller. "Over the last two weeks, we have seen a spike in user reports from India about spam calls over WhatsApp," Mamedi said, noting that telemarketers switching to internet calling was fairly new to the market.

Elephant in the room?

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Don't do Whatsapp. Problem solved.

Re:

[lofoforabr]

About spam, isn't regular phone the same or even worse than that? I had to actually block every phone call unless the number is in my contacts. Before I did that, I got dozens of spam calls everyday. It sucks, but people managed to destroy an otherwise fine means of communication.

Re:

[CAIMLAS]

You can't put the cat back in the bag, but making it illegal to share your customer's PII (including name, email address, or phone number) would make robocalls/spam all but disappear, I suspect.

Whatsapp is a Facebook/Meta Product

[atrimtab]

Using it at all is a terrible idea.

Truecaller EULA

[Anonymous Coward]

Just a heads up, but by using Truecaller, you're opting in to giving them your name, your phone number, as well as the name / address / email address / phone number / date of birth / everything you have in the contacts details for every contact in your phone.

This is how they build their caller ID database, by verifying that several users have "Jim Bob" in their contacts as 555-111-2222

SPam on Whatsapp ?

[dargaud]

I've been using Whatsapp for a few years and I have yet to see/receive a single spam msg/call. Is it really something that happens ?

Re:

[alexgieg]

Is it really something that happens ?

It does. I'm in Brazil and use it extensively, as everyone and the kitchen sink here are WhatsApp users. Spam over it is still very rare for me, but I do get an "announcement" for something once every two months or so. This is very likely going to increase in frequency over time as spammers get used to WhatsApp-targeting tools.

Disable adblock

[Loki Prankster]

The site points to the Reuters page which requires me to disable adblock. I never do that, I rather look for another page to visit.

Re:

[alexgieg]

The site points to the Reuters page which requires me to disable adblock.

It works fine with uBlock Origin here. If you're using it, and the site is detecting that, you need to check your filters list and enable a few more.

Myself, I have all filter lists in groups "Internal", "Ads", "Privacy", "Malware Domains", "Annoyances" and "Multiuse", plus a few country-specific ones in the "Regions and Idioms" group, enabled. Doing that rarely gives me trouble, and in the event it does, I add the relevant exceptions.

TrueCaller *is* spam

[Tony Isaac]

I tried it a while back, but it's gotten so full of ads, it became more annoying to use TrueCaller, than to just put up with the spam calls.