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Two By Two Fri, 28 Feb 25 |
An abridged, narrative version of the latest episode of Two by Two, The Ken’s premium weekly business podcast. |
Airtel fights spammers. And Truecaller’s business model. Whose responsibility is it to protect you from being scammed?
| 7 min read |
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Spam calls.
Universally hated. Incredibly difficult to avoid. And at the centre of an arms race between exhausted mobile users on one side and desperate telemarketers and scamsters on the other.
Most of us try to save ourselves from the hassle by using some form of caller ID app. I’m pretty sure Truecaller is the answer for a large majority of us—the free platform has over 275 million monthly active users in India after all.
But that kind of dominance attracts challenges, and Indian telecom heavyweight Bharti Airtel’s anti-spam feature launched in September is exactly that. A challenge. The feature is available free of charge for all Airtel users with a VoLTE-enabled smartphone. And as per the latest reports, it has already tagged more than 8 billion spam calls.
There are… cracks, though. Some new, some familiar to anyone who’s used Truecaller before.
I am one of those rare individuals who has a Vodafone Idea connection, so I haven’t experienced Airtel’s new feature first hand. But both our hosts on Two by Two, Rohin Dharmakumar and Praveen Gopal Krishnan, and all three guests we had for our latest episode—Parag Kar, former vice president of government affairs at Qualcomm India and Southeast Asia; Chaitanya Chokkareddy, co-founder of Ozonetel, a cloud-based communication platform providing call-centre solutions; and The Ken reporter Rounak Kumar Gunjan—are Airtel users.
So we took a poll in the studio about how reliable the five of them found Airtel’s anti-spam network. Only two said they fully trusted Airtel’s discretion.
The others, Rohin especially, had some strong reasons for why they didn’t.
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Suspected Spam?
Would you pick up a call that came with a warning like this?
| Source: Rohin Dharmakumar |
Settled on an answer yet? Great. We’ll come back to that in just a bit.
But first, let me give you some context on how Airtel’s SPAM warning system works. Quoting from Airtel’s press release on the launch:
Developed in-house by Airtel’s data scientists, the AI-powered solution uses a proprietary algorithm to identify and classify calls and SMSes as “Suspected SPAM”. The network powered by state-of-the-art AI algorithm analyses various parameters such as the caller or sender’s usage patterns, call/SMS frequency, call duration amongst several others, on a real time basis. By cross-referencing this information against known spam patterns, the system flags suspected spam calls and SMSes accurately.
So, unlike Truecaller, it doesn’t take any input from users to categorise calls as spam or not spam. Neither is there an option for users to do so. I found out from Airtel’s FAQ page that if you received a spam call that it failed to mark as spam, it was because “the system has not detected spam-like behavior for that number”.
But it’s not just spam warnings. On some occasions, the system tells you a bit more about the number calling you.
| Source: Rohin Dharmakumar |
You’ll notice the first call in the picture has been tagged as Policybazaar, while the others I’ve highlighted are just marked as spam.
A point Rohin brought up during the tail end of this week’s session was how he used to spot these calls from Policybazaar earlier. The first giveaway, of course, was that the number would start with 0-1-2-4.
But once Airtel rolled out its anti-spam network, these calls underwent an intriguing series of transformations. First, the system started marking them as spam, and after a few weeks of this, calls from numbers starting with that sequence tapered off.
Soon after, though, he started getting calls from what seemed like Policybazaar employees’ numbers. And now, Policybazaar call-centre calls are back in full force, but the ‘SPAM’ warnings are gone. Instead, now Airtel just flags them as Policybazaar.
Well, do you know who else offers something similar for businesses?
| Source: Hari Krishna |
But here’s the thing: Truecaller charges businesses for a verified badge.
Airtel has clearly said it does not charge any businesses.
So, the first question that may occur to one is: why did Airtel mark Policybazaar as spam earlier, but not now?
The implications for a business whose calls are tagged as spam are huge.
It could mean a significant loss of revenue if telemarketing is their biggest lead generator. And while missing regular promotional calls may not be much of an issue, what if the call was about something more important? Like a fairly huge credit-card transaction that the bank is calling you to validate.
| Source: Rohin Dharmakumar |
You’ll notice that the third call I’ve highlighted has been flagged as HDFC Bank transaction monitoring. That seems like a useful implementation of Airtel’s AI identification systems.
But… remember that call and the question I asked you right at the beginning of this edition?
Would you pick it up?
| Source: Rohin Dharmakumar |
If you didn’t, you just missed a very important call from ICICI Bank trying to validate a credit-card transaction. We know because Rohin actually went ahead and picked up the call.
My colleague Rounak, who was one of our guests, has already written about how Truecaller built its business crowdsourcing data from customers to help stop scam calls, and giving businesses a chance to improve their outbound call pick-up rates by giving them the green ‘Verified’ label. And there are others who have tried similar things—like Samsung’s strategic partnership with Hiya, a company providing spam and fraud call protection. If you own a Samsung phone (like I do), it’s a built-in feature on your dialler that you choose to enable. So after we wrapped up the recording, I went ahead and enabled it.
And then this happened.
| Source: Hari Krishna |
I guess such problems aren’t exclusive to Airtel’s new network.
This week’s episode of Two by Two is a deep, engrossing dive into the weeds—what are the biggest downsides to these systems? Are there better alternatives? What role can the regulator play?
Think of what you’ve read so far as a trailer to this week’s insight-dense, lively discussion.
You can listen to the full episode here.
As always, you can write to [email protected] with your thoughts on the episode, or leave a comment on our website edition.
See you next week.
Regards,
Hari Krishna
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Hari works as a producer and researcher on Two by Two and First Principles. He’s from a “little village in Kerala where nothing much happens”, enjoys reading books (although he loves buying them even more), and appreciates films—be it on Netflix or Criterion.
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