Contact and call identification app Truecaller has released it s global survey "Spam Report" in which it identified which countries were plagued by the most spam calls. India stood fourth on the list this year from ninth in the last, as telemarketing and sales calls rose exponentially this year the company said.
Over 202 million spam calls in India were made by a single number Over a time period of 10 months, although Truecaller did not specify who the number belonged to. Know-your-customer (KYC)-related spam and scam calls, where callers pretend to be officials from a bank, a certain digital wallet, a digital payments service or the RBI, were the most common, according to the report.
Sales-related calls were at 93.5% in India according the report which also mentioned a trend where scammers pretended to lure in customers using the excuse of an OTP or other methods to get them to download and install remote-access apps which would allow scammers to steal money from accounts.
"Average number of spam calls per user per month stands at 16.8 while total spam volumes received by Truecaller users alone are in excess of 3.8 billion calls in just the month of Oct," the report said.
Brazil topped the list for the fourth year in a row, with the average Truecaller user receiving 32.9 calls on average per month. Truecaller also noted that African countries had an issue with SMS spam as Cameroon took first place with 16 spam SMS per month on average, followed by Somalia and Tanzania.
In Indonesia, scammers were particularly adept at digging up personal details and financial history of their targets, with the biggest worry being that most Indonesian could not identify scammers, Truecaller said. It is also running a campaign in the country to help users identify and avoid scam calls.
Globally, the company said it identified 184.5 billion calls and 586 billion messages. Of those, 37.8 billion spam calls were identified and blocked, while 182 billion messages were identified and blocked. Overall, among all spam call categories, as high as 93.5 per cent were sales-related calls.
The data in this report was aggregated anonymously from incoming and outgoing calls & messages for all Truecaller users during the period of January 1st, 2021 to October 31, 2021. No context of any calls or messages was read, the company said.