Andrew Bonwick
Vice President of Product Development at Relm Insurance
Madhav Sheth
CEO of Ai+ Smartphone
Varun Kashyap & Sridevi Reddy
Co-Founders, Zithara.ai
Transforming Indian Offline Retail and Customer Engagement Using AI

One of the most popular spam and caller ID apps in the market Truecaller found itself surrounded in controversy later on Tuesday after a lot of users of the application complained that the app was forcing them to sign up for the new Truecaller Pay app without permission. It’s notable that Truecaller Pay is a UPI payments based app newly introduced by Truecaller. Firstly, the users showed their disappointment on the Google Play Store in the reviews section as they typed their complaints. Later on, some complaints also surfaced on Twitter where the users of Truecaller was trying to sign them up for Truecaller Pay forcefully. The company, on the other hand, has said that this is because of a new bug.

Truecaller Blames Happening on a Bug
In its official statement, Truecaller said, “We have discovered a bug in the latest update of Truecaller that affected the payments feature, which automatically triggered a registration post updating to the version.” It added, “This was a bug, and we have discontinued this version of the app so no other users will be affected. We’re sorry about this version not passing our quality standards. We’ve taken quick steps to fix the issue, and already rolled out a fix in a new version. For the users already affected, the new version with the fix will be available shortly, however, in the meanwhile, they can choose to manually deregister through the overflow menu in the app.”
A lot of Truecaller users took to Twitter to show their disappointment by tagging the Truecaller official account. Since registration for UPI based services requires the phone number of the user linked with a particular bank account to begin with, the application was trying to register the user for the payment service on its own. As a result, the users started receiving messages on their number like “Your registration for UPI app has started. If it was not you, report now to your bank.” After receiving these messages, the users of Truecaller were concerned and started responding to the company on various social media platforms. However, it is worth noting that the actual UPI registration would have gone through since it requires the users to enter their UPI ID manually.