India made over 202mn spam calls between Jan to Oct: Report

New Delhi, Dec 17 Over 202 million spam calls were made by just one spammer in India this year, that is over 6,64,000 calls every day and 27,000 calls every hour of every day, a new report revealed on Friday.

As per the Global Spam Report 2021, India has moved up in rankings from 9th to 4th position owing to a significant increase in sales and telemarketing calls. This year, all categories of sales-related calls make up a vast majority (93.5 per cent) of all incoming spam calls.

One of the most common scams in the country remains the ever-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.

This year, Truecaller has been able to help our 300 million users around the world block and identify 37.8 billion spam calls.

Brazil has retained its title of the most spammed country in the world (four years in a row) with 32.9 spam calls per user per month. There is a significant gap between the average number of spam calls received in Brazil (32.9 calls per user per month) versus Peru (18.02 calls per user per month) which stands in the second position and Ukraine stands at third position.

Comparing the average number of incoming spam calls v/s messages per user per month. Cameroon tops the list, followed by Somalia, Tanzania, Congo, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast and Benin. All of these are African countries. Brazil is eighth and the African countries start off again: Niger, Togo, Sudan, Ethiopia and so on. Clearly, SMS spam is a bigger problem area for users across the African continent.

For calls, the US dropped from a high second place in 2020, down to 20th place in 2021 - almost off the top 20 countries list.

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