Single spammer in India made 202 million calls in 10 months: Truecaller

As spam rate spiked in India, a single spammer in India made over 202 million calls between January and October this year, a Truecaller report said.

The country moved from the ninth to the fourth position among the top 20 most spammed countries, the Global Spam Report 2021 by Truecaller showed. The increase in spam calls was mostly due to a rise in sales and telemarketing calls, which made up 93.5 percent of all incoming spam calls.

One of the most common scams is the KYC (know your customer) fraud, where the scammer pretends to be calling from a bank or a digital payment service firm and asks for the user’s KYC documents as mandated by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).

A number of reports from users to Truecaller have found that scammers lure unsuspecting victims under the pretext of online sales and lotteries and ask them to download a remote access app, which eventually leads to loss of money.

According to the report, the monthly average number of spam calls per user was 16.8. In October, the total spam volume received by Truecaller users was over 3.8 billion calls.

At the global level, Truecaller users received 184.5 billion calls and 586 billion messages. Of these, users identified and blocked 37.8 billion spam calls and 182 billion messages. Truecaller has 300 million users across the globe.

For the fourth time in a row, Brazil remained the most spammed country in the world with 32.9 spam calls per user per month. Peru came in second with 18.02 calls per user per month, which is much less than Brazil’s monthly average.

The majority of 44.1 percent of spam calls in Brazil came from the financial services sector such as banks, credit card companies, credit unions and loan providers. Another significant chunk came from the sales and marketing sector.