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Made in Sweden
Your handset is in safe hands Remember when the phone used to ring and you didn’t know who it was? Those days became a thing of the past thanks to Truecaller – widely regarded as the world’s best caller ID and spam-blocking app. Now used by millions of people around the world, the app has also proved impactful in unexpected areas – such as protecting vulnerable women in need. By Emma Rodin |
Photos: Truecaller
Rewind to the year 2009 and Truecaller is emerging on the world’s tech scene from its native Sweden. Founded by engineering students Nami Zarringhalam and Alan Mamedi, the app was born from a shared desire and personal need to solve the issues around call identification, and to make communication safer and more efficient. “Since we were both engineers, we just started coding the app, built several iterations and put it up on a tech forum. Within a few weeks we had over 10,000 30 |
Issue 144
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July 2022
downloads and that is when we knew this could be much bigger,” explains co-founder Alan Mamedi. Today, the app’s global stats come in at impressive levels. 586 billion spam SMS and 184.5 billion spam calls were identified in 2021 alone. On top of that, 37.8 billion spam calls and 182 billion spam SMS were blocked. The true in Truecaller To paint a better picture of Truecaller, Mamedi suggests thinking about when
someone knocks on your door. “You need to know who it is before you open the door, right? Similarly, we believe that you have the right to know who is calling before you answer. We built this trust by identifying calls that you might want to take, warning you about spam, scams and potential frauds and correctly identifying businesses that may be reaching out to you for legitimate reasons,” he says. At its heart, Truecaller is a community-driven service and platform. Because, while its team work on developing the app itself, the real power of Truecaller comes from active reporting by users. The team has built advanced machine learning models that can analyse community reports, and identify calls with colours. Blue is a standard call, red is a spam/scam caller, while green and purple are used for verified businesses or
