Google moves to curb persistent RCS spam problem in India with industry support

As ongoing spam complaints continue to cast a shadow over Google's push for Rich Communication Services, or RCS, in India, the company is now leaning into closer carrier integration in an effort to strengthen protections on the platform.

On Sunday, Bharti Airtel, India's second-largest telecom operator with more than 463 million subscribers, announced a partnership with Google to bring its network-level spam filtering to the country's RCS ecosystem. According to the companies, the goal of the move is to improve safeguards against unwanted messages and fraudulent activity on the platform.

India has become an especially difficult market for spam and fraud across messaging services, driven by the country's large mobile user base, the rapid expansion of digital payments, and aggressive marketing by enterprises. Back in 2022, complaints about unsolicited advertisements on Google's RCS platform — primarily delivered through the Google Messages app — became serious enough that Google temporarily paused business promotions on the service in India. Even so, some users have continued to report spam in Google Messages, indicating the problem is not fully resolved.

Airtel said it had been cautious about moving toward a deeper relationship with Google's RCS until message traffic could pass through its own spam control systems, underscoring telecom carriers' concerns about rising fraud risks.

"We had not onboarded Google because we first wanted RCS messages to be routed through the Airtel spam filter," an Airtel spokesperson said.

Under the new partnership, Airtel's network intelligence will be combined with Google's RCS platform to enable real-time checks on business messaging. Those checks will include sender verification, spam detection, and enforcement of users' do-not-disturb preferences. Airtel described the initiative as a "global first" for the direct integration of a telecom operator's spam filtering into an over-the-top messaging platform. Still, neither company provided comparative details to support that characterisation.

"We are committed to continuing to work with the broader ecosystem of carriers to create a consistent and trusted messaging experience for RCS users around the world," Sameer Samat, president of Android ecosystem at Google, said in a statement. His remarks suggest that Google may want to expand this model beyond India as it continues efforts to standardise security protections across the broader RCS ecosystem.

India remains a hugely important market for Google's messaging ambitions, given that it has more than a billion internet users and over 700 million smartphone users. The country is also home to more than 853 million WhatsApp users, according to World Population Review, which highlights the scale of competition in the mobile messaging space.

Prabhu Ram, vice president of the industry research group at CyberMedia Research, said the deeper integration with a telecom carrier reflects efforts to address longstanding weaknesses in rich messaging systems, which have often been exposed to spam and fraud.

"The efficacy of this partnership should be reflected in metrics such as reductions in spam volume, user complaints, and fraud incidence, as well as improvements in engagement with legitimate messages," Ram said.

Over the past year, Airtel has been intensifying its anti-spam efforts, saying that its AI-driven systems have blocked more than 71 billion spam calls and 2.9 billion spam messages. According to the company, thishas helped contribute to an early 9% decline in fraud-related financial losses across its network.

More broadly, Google has been promoting RCS as the successor to SMS, stating in May 2025 that the standard handled more than 1 billion messages per day in the United States, based on a 28-day average.

Google did not say whether similar carrier-level integrations are being planned for other markets, nor did it provide any estimate of how much the new partnership in India could reduce spam and fraud.