India has the dubious distinction of being among the top-5 countries of the world where smartphone users receive the maximum number of spam calls. According to Truecaller, the caller ID and call blocking app, India was on ninth position on this list last year but moved into fourth position in 2021.
The company further reveals via its annual Truecaller Global Spam Report that the country moved up this dubious list due to a substantial spike in telemarketing and sales calls. This could have been the outcome of poor sales during the post-Covid-19 lockdown and lockdowns causing non-touchpoint sales.
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In general, spammers were more active
The report highlighted that just as the pandemic and the lockdown affected human communication patterns, the same behaviors were also evident in the spam pattern tracked by Truecaller.
The company said they had helped identify a massive 184.5 billion unknown calls and identified 586 billion messages. Truecaller users made 99.7 billion calls and sent 7.8 billion messages during the period between January and October this year.
It further referenced the US spam report released earlier this year to indicate that as many as 59 million Americans reported having lost money to scams between July 2020 and September 2021 with an average loss of $502 per person. This totalled to a staggering $29.8 billion if extrapolated to the entire country.
A dubious record - one spammer 202 million calls
The report highlighted another dubious record from India. Truecaller said that just one spammer in India made 202 million spam calls. In other words, the caller made it to the smartphones of 0.6 million people each day or 27,000 of them each hour - all from just a single phone number.
It said all categories of sales related calls made up 93.5% of all incoming spam calls in India during 2021. Ironically, one of the most common spammer was the popular know-your-customer (KYC) scam where fraudsters pretend to represent a bank or digital payment service and ask users for their personal details.
If sales and marketing calls topped the list of spammers in India, the second name on this list was financial services. Once again, the irony cannot be ignored as India's federal government has been pushing financial inclusion through a variety of ways including expanding the banked population and via encouraging fin-tech start-ups.
Users also reported to Truecaller that scammers lure victims via online sales and lottery winnings and then get them to download a remote access application that could eventually lead to money being whisked away from their bank accounts, debit cards and even digital wallets.
A global perspective
Globally, Brazil 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) in the second position.
The rankings look very different when you start 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.
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