India's battle against spam calls is intensifying, with Truecaller's 2025 India Insights Report revealing an alarming surge in scam attempts leveraging AI-generated voices and impersonations. Scammers are rapidly adopting sophisticated techniques, including identity verification scams, impersonating familiar institutions, and multi-step fraud that combines messages and calls, to deceive unsuspecting individuals.

Rishit Jhunjhunwala, CEO of Truecaller, highlights a concerning trend: scams are becoming increasingly "voluntary," where victims willingly transfer money believing the transactions are legitimate. He cites "digital arrest" as a prime example, contrasting it with involuntary scams like account takeovers or OTP fraud. These new scams often sound routine or even exciting, promising unrealistic rewards to lure victims.

The report also indicates a shift in scam activity towards third-party messaging platforms like WhatsApp and Instagram, in addition to traditional SMS and phone calls. Scammers exploit these channels with fake electricity bills, traffic challans, and other deceptive messages.

Truecaller's 2025 report paints a stark picture, revealing that 41.68 billion spam calls were identified. To combat the rising threat of AI-driven scams, Truecaller has launched the 'AI Call Scanner', a feature designed to detect AI-generated voices during calls. This technology briefly pauses the call to analyze the voice and determine if it's human or computer-generated, providing users with instant feedback.

AI voice cloning involves using sophisticated technologies to replicate a person's voice, including their tone, pitch, rhythm, and pronunciation. With just a small voice sample from social media or a phone call, scammers can create convincing voice clones. This makes it particularly dangerous, as the voice often sounds real enough to trick victims. Scammers have been known to take voice samples from social media and use AI to clone the voice, which is then used to call and scam a person's family.

Examples of AI voice scams include corporate fraud, where the cloned voice of a company executive is used to trick employees into transferring funds. Another type is family distress scams, where fraudsters impersonate family members in urgent situations to request money.

Truecaller's AI Call Scanner is available on Android as part of Truecaller Premium and is being rolled out in the US first, followed by India and other top markets. To use the feature, users need to upgrade to the latest Truecaller version and set Truecaller as their main calling app. When a suspicious call is received, tapping "Start AI Detection" will pause the call, analyze the voice, and provide an immediate on-screen notification indicating whether the voice is human or AI.

As AI technology advances, scams are expected to become more sophisticated, emphasizing the importance of behavioral context, community reporting, and long-term activity patterns in building trust. Truecaller CEO Alan Mamedi has called AI voice cloning the 'nuclear bomb' of the digital scam world.