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100% Free Sender ID Lookup

100% Free SMS Sender ID Lookup

Secure & Reliable

Secure & Reliable

242.M fraud messages identified in 2023

242.M fraud messages identified in 2023

Why Use Truecaller for SMS Sender ID Lookup?

With the amount of text messages that we receive daily, it gets difficult to understand which is important, which is a legitimate SMS and which could be a potential fraud or a scam message. 

To avoid sharing any details on text messages that could cause a potential loss of identity or money via smishing it is important to understand the identity of the unknown SMS sender. That’s where Truecaller’s SMS Sender ID Lookup tool helps in identifying if the SMS Sender ID is a spam sender, a potential fraud or a legitimate business communicating with you.

A Sender ID is what identifies the sender of bulk SMS messages. When a text message is received, the recipient may see the sender's information in different formats like

  1. A local phone number
  2. An international phone number
  3. A short code with letters and numbers (an alphanumeric short code)
  4. or , A code of 3 to 8 digits

These formats depend on the country, the sender’s registration and the carrier rules. But all of them help us in identifying who the sender is behind the text message.


SMS sender ID has some local regulations that need to be followed. So in India, the rule is pretty straightforward, SMS sender IDs would be of maximum 9 characters with the following format:

XX-XXXXXX

Here, the 1st character would be the identity of the telecom operator who is sending the message, the 2nd character would be telecom circle. There is a fixed identifier that the Indian telecom regulation has provided for every telecom operator and circle. 

The hyphen or dash remains as the 3rd character and the next 6 characters identifies the name of the sender of the SMS.

So, the VM-XXXXXX in message sender IDs, the ‘V’ says it is Vodafone Group of Companies, ‘M’ is for Mumbai circle of operation. 

The next characters could be anything like HDFCBK (for HDFC Bank) or FLPKRT (for Flipkart).

Basically a VM-HDFCBK message sender ID means that the message is from HDFCBK which is actually originating from the Mumbai SMS operational circle for Vodafone telecom operator. 

  1. Identification: With such regulations in place, it is easy for identification of sender of bulk messages
  2. Branding/Awareness: For SMS senders, when it's important that the users actually open messages and read the notification/communication they need to share with them, a sender ID helps in providing identification to users. It also helps in keeping it consistent for the user that a business, let's say, is sending messages from identifiable message sender ID. 

It really is as easy as these 3 steps:

  1. Add the sender id you want to look up in the search bar above
  2. Click on search
  3. Login to view the details!

There is no payment behind the login, the details provided are 100% free of charge!

With multiple signals and advanced machine learning algorithms, Truecaller is able to identify if a sender ID is a potential fraud or not. 

If you download the app, it will also notify you against a message if it seems like a fraud message, so that you are safeguarded! That’s not all, you can even see comments left by our 425 million strong community, and you can even help the whole community by adding comments for the sender IDs on the app!