India ranks 4th among nations most affected by spam calls

TIL Desk/Business/New Delhi/ India has moved up in rankings from ninth to the fourth spot this year in the tally of top 20 countries affected by spam calls, owing to a significant increase in sales and telemarketing calls, as per a report by Truecaller. This year, all categories of sales-related calls made up a vast majority (93.5 per cent) of all incoming spam calls.

Interestingly, over 202 million spam calls were made by just one spammer in India this year between January to October – which is over 6.64 lakh calls every day and 27,000 calls every hour of every day. One of the most common scams in the country remains the popular KYC (know your customer) scam where fraudsters pretend to be a bank, wallet, or digital payment service, asking for user KYC documents as mandated by the Reserve Bank of India.

The average number of spam calls per user per month stood at 16.8, while total spam volumes received by Truecaller users alone are in excess of 3.8 billion calls in the month of October. At a global level, Truecaller 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.