India’s spam complaints rose 41% in a quarter; one-year disconnections fell 71%

01Complaints up 41%, nine in ten through TRAI’s app

Complaints rose even as calls fell: 714.01 billion calls were made in July–September against 730.82 billion in April–June.¹² Almost all of the rise came through TRAI’s own DND app, which took 1.421 million complaints, 92.9% of the total, against 0.966 million and 89% a quarter earlier. In 2025 the app carried just over half: 17.06 lakh of 31.09 lakh complaints for the year.⁴

The app is being pushed hard. Downloads reached 4.236 million on 30 September, from 3.316 million on 30 June and 28.08 lakh at the end of 2025.¹²⁴ In the quarter TRAI ran campaigns on 132 FM channels, 23 private TV channels and 97 newspapers, and more than 3 billion text messages about the app were sent to customers.¹ TRAI says complaints are “the basis for identification of the spammers”, so more complaints are what it is asking for.¹

02Fewer numbers cut off, more senders blacklisted

Operators act on “actionable” complaints, the ones that meet the rules’ tests, and the penalty climbs with each violation. A first violation bars the number’s outgoing service for 15 days; a repeat disconnects it for a year. A sender, the business or telemarketer behind the numbers and SMS headers, can be blacklisted for a year, and is then given no new telecom resources by any operator.¹

So actionable complaints rose about 31% while barring fell 20% and one-year disconnections 71%. Against each actionable complaint there were about 0.33 actions on numbers in April–June and 0.17 in July–September. The penalties aimed at the sender rose: 374 senders blacklisted against 263, and 3,725 SMS headers blocked against 2,873.¹² TRAI’s releases give no reason for the fall in disconnections.

A second route is growing beside complaints. Operators’ AI systems flagged 18.28 billion incoming calls as suspected spam in July–September, 2.6% of all, and sent 4.59 million warnings to suspected senders, against 243,000 in the first week of warnings in June. They re-checked the identity (e-KYC) of 34,025 suspected senders and disconnected 9,977 numbers that failed, a line April–June’s release did not carry.¹²

03The rules changed on 18 September: what to watch

TRAI’s Third Amendment to its commercial-communication rules, issued on 18 September, ties complaints to the operators’ AI flags. Under it, action against a sender starts at three unique complaints in ten days if the sender’s number is also flagged by the AI system, where five complaints were needed before. Five or more of a sender’s numbers flagged within ten days triggers investigation and graded action, from KYC re-checks to barring and disconnection.³ Businesses that call customers through software must declare those automated calls, and the numbers used, to their operator, or the calls count as spam; an operator receiving them may charge the sending operator up to ₹0.05 a minute.³ Call-blocking apps are barred from blanket-blocking or tagging calls from TRAI’s 140, 1600 and 1601 series, the numbers reserved for registered promotional and service calls.³

What to watch.

• The October–December release: whether the three-complaint trigger lifts disconnections back toward April–June’s 46,786.
• Complaints per million calls, now 2.14: with app downloads still climbing, this line can rise because more people report, not only because more spam is sent.¹
• The AI route against the complaint route: 9,977 disconnections after failed KYC already rival the 13,777 made on complaints.¹

How TRAI wants operators to answer complaints in general is in our Note on its 2 November amendment.