Truecaller now lets you chat with more people — instead of your family

Truecaller recently launched a new feature that allows one person to be in charge of a family group, receive notifications of scam calls received by other members, and hang up on their behalf if they think their family member might be being scammed.

The company, which has ended 450 million usersfirst launched the program in December in a few countries such as Sweden, Chile, Malaysia, and Kenya. Truecaller said after seeing positive results, they decided to roll out globally, including in India, the company’s largest market. The feature is free, and users can create groups even if they are not on Truecaller’s paid plan.

With this feature, a tech-savvy member of a family or group of friends can be the manager of a group of five people. When the other members join the group, the administrator can receive notifications of fraudulent calls. If the administrator believes that the call may cause harm to the member, he or she can remotely block the call. Although an administrator can receive notifications of fraudulent calls when a member is using iOS or Android, he can only block calls from members on Android.

On Android, members can also give permission to an administrator to detect real-time activity such as walking or driving, battery level, and phone ringtones (to see if the phone is on silent). Truecaller said this is useful for admins to monitor the elderly and call them when they are not walking or driving.

The administrator can also block certain numbers and international dialing codes, and share the blocklist with group members.

Truecaller realized that the administrator cannot see the history of calls or SMS of group members.

“I think, unfortunately, we all know someone or someone in our family or friends who has been scammed,” Kunal Dua, Chief Product Officer, at Truecaller, told TechCrunch in a phone call. “In this way, it’s an important change for Truecaller in terms of what we’ve been looking at as a problem,” he added.

Last year, Truecaller launched voicemail feature for Indian users with an AI assistant that listens to calls when the user is not available and provides a summary of the notes. The company is looking at a similar AI system for family protection to alert administrators about what type of fraud a team member is receiving.

The company is also looking to use AI to identify calls and delete them only when certain terms associated with fraud are identified, such as “digital arrest” – a technique in which criminals pose as law enforcement officers to obtain information or money from the recipient of the call.

In India, fake calls have increased over time and cost money across the country. Truecaller said it identified more than 7.7 billion fraudulent calls last year. Indian officials have launched many actionsincluding a conflicting points SIM binding that can prevent the functionality of applications such as WhatsApp and Telegram.

Truecaller is facing a storm. Its share has fallen by 80% in the last 12 months. In its Q4 2025 report, the company said that EBDITA – the level of profitability – fell 49% year-on-year, while advertising revenue fell 31%. The company is also facing challenges from India Calling Name Display (CNAP), which shows the caller’s name as registered with their phone carrier. Truecaller insisted that simply displaying the caller’s name would not reduce spam calls, arguing that its platform goes further with community reporting.

“In India, there has been a lot of talk about the rollout of CNAP,” said Truecaller CEO Rishit Jhunjhunwala during the Q4 2025 earnings call. “CNAP has been rolled out partially, and so far, the impact on user growth is minimal. As we’ve said before, we expect CNAP to have an impact on user growth, but that remains to be seen when CNAP reaches full rollout.”

Continued Jhunjhunwala, “We are focused on providing a superior product, and as you know, consumers can choose to have CNAP and Truecaller in parallel, where we provide more information and more and other solutions, to consumers.”