India 4th most spammed country in world, says report
Dec 18, 2021
New Delhi [India], December 18 : According to the annual Global Spam Report released by Truecaller, India is the fourth most spammed country.
Over 202 million spam calls were made by just one spammer in India. That's over 664,000 people that were disturbed by spam calls every day and 27,000 people every hour - from just one phone number, says the report.
According to the company's 2021 Global spam and scam report, India's ranking shot up to the fourth spot in terms of spam calls, up from ninth in 2020. This was mainly because of a significant increase in sales and telemarketing calls.
Referring to the worldwide trend in spamming, the report says there was a noticeable increase in total spam calls in March and it correlates to when there were fierce new COVID-19 waves sweeping across many developing nations.
"Spammers and scammers wasted no time in capitalising on this opportunity, whether it was about selling life-saving drugs, oxygen cylinders, oxygen concentrators or securing scarce hospital beds," said Truecaller.
As per the report, the vast majority 93.5 per cent of all spam in India are sales or telemarketing calls.
One of the common scams in the country remains the ever-popular KYC (know your customer) scam where fraudsters pretend to be a bank or digital payment service, asking for user KYC documents as mandated by the Reserve Bank of India.
In addition, multiple users reports to Truecaller mention that the typical way scammers operate in India is to lure unsuspecting victims under some pretext (OTPs, online sales, lotteries) and get them to download a remote access app which eventually leads to a huge loss of money from banks, cards and digital mobile wallets.
The 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 a month of October, read the report.
The Truecaller report was based on an analysis of billions of calls received by 300 million users.
Three countries ahead of India in terms of spammers are Brazil, Peru and Ukraine. The company noted that spamming is a global problem and "the reason the spam and scam business still exists is that it is hugely profitable for very little effort and consequences."
