Is Call Bombing Illegal in India?
Call bombing is illegal in India. Here are the exact laws that apply: IT Act section 66D, TRAI's commercial communications rules, and what happens to the person sending the calls.
The direct answer
Yes. Call bombing is illegal in India, and it is illegal in a way that is written down specifically rather than being left to general harassment provisions.
The clearest provision is section 66D of the Information Technology Act, 2000. It criminalises repeatedly sending unsolicited messages, calls or voice calls to another person, with imprisonment of up to three years or a fine, or both.
Section 66D of the IT Act, 2000
The section reads, in effect: whoever transmits any information in such a manner as to cause annoyance, inconvenience or intimidation to another person by deliberately causing repeated calls or repeated transmission of messages, is punishable with imprisonment for up to three years, or with a fine, or with both.
Three elements matter here. The information must be unsolicited, the transmission must be repeated, and the effect must be annoyance or intimidation. A single marketing call does not meet the bar. A continuous flood does.
TRAI's commercial communications rules
Independently of the criminal law, TRAI's Telecom Commercial Communications Preference Rules govern who may contact you and how. Promotional messages require consent captured through a registered template and a sender ID registered against a Distributed Ledger Technology platform.
A bombing service that sends promotional content without that registration is in breach of the licence conditions of whatever telecom network carries the traffic. This is the reason most real bombing attempts use a mix of registered and unregistered traffic, and the reason carriers are able to act quickly once complaint volumes cross a threshold.
The National Customer Preference Register
The DND registry is not a law, but it is the mechanism that actually removes promotional traffic at the network level. Once your number is registered against all categories, compliant operators are required to suppress promotional calls to it.
This is worth understanding carefully, because it sets a realistic expectation. DND stops registered promotional traffic. It does not stop a transactional-fraud call pretending to be a bank, and it does not stop a deliberate attack using unregistered routes. For those, the escalation route at cybercrime.gov.in is the mechanism that matters.
What actually happens to the person bombing you
In practice, enforcement against individuals is rare, and that rarity is part of why these services keep operating. But the mechanics that do work are consistent. Complaint volumes across many victims get a series investigated. The rented number gets blocked. The account funding the gateway gets terminated and often gets the person behind it flagged.
The risk is not symmetric. The person placing the calls is exposing their own identity, their payment trail and their account. The person receiving them is only losing time. If a service tells you it is fully anonymous, that is the first and clearest sign it is lying.
What to do if you need to report it
File at cybercrime.gov.in. A complaint that is thin gets closed, because there is nothing actionable in it. A complaint with a timestamped call log screenshot, the series pattern, and a note that the calls continued after DND registration is a case an officer can work with.
Complain to your operator at the same time. Carrier complaint volumes are the metric that actually triggers network-level action, and yours is one of the data points that builds it.
- Screenshot the call log with timestamps before blocking anything
- Note the pattern: how many calls, over what period, from which series
- Register on the National Customer Preference Register if you have not already
- File a detailed complaint at cybercrime.gov.in with the screenshots attached
- Raise a complaint with your mobile operator and keep the reference number