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

A single spammer made over 202 million spam calls in India this year, according to Truecaller’s Global Spam Report 2021. The year also saw India rise to the 4th spot in spam calls, up from 9th in 2020, owing to a significant increase in sales and telemarketing calls.

The average number of spam calls in India per user per month was 16.8, while the total number of spams received by Truecaller users alone was over 3.8 billion in the month of October.

This year, sales related calls accounted for 93.5 per cent of all incoming spam calls, financial services related spam calls were 3.1 per cent, nuisance calls accounted for 2 per cent, while the remaining 1.4 per cent were by scamsters. Last year, scam calls accounted for 9 per cent of all spam calls in India.

The report reveals that the commonest scam calls in the country are the KYC (know your customer) related scams, where fraudsters pretend to be from a bank, wallet or digital payment service, and ask for the user’s KYC documents as mandated by the Reserve Bank of India.

Multiple user reports to Truecaller say that scammers usually lure unsuspecting victims under some pretext (OTPs, online sales, lotteries) and get them to download a remote access app, which eventually leads to the user losing a huge amount of money from banks, cards and digital mobile wallets.

According to Truecaller data, Brazil was the country most affected by spam in 2021, followed by Peru, Ukraine, India, Mexico, Indonesia and Chile. The report says that the Covid-19 pandemic has not only affected communication behaviour, but also spam patterns around the world.

Truecaller said in a statement that it has been able to help its 300 million users around the world identify and block 37.8 billion spam calls. The data in this report was aggregated anonymously from incoming and outgoing calls and messages between January 1 and October 31, 2021.

Global trends

For the fourth year in a row, Brazil has retained the title of the most spammed country in the world, with 32.9 spam calls per user per month. There is a significant gap between Brazil’s average number of spam calls and that of Peru, the country in the second spot, with 18.02 calls per user per month.

When it comes to spam SMS, Cameroon tops the list, followed by Somalia, Tanzania, Congo, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast and Benin. Other countries in the top 20 spam SMS list include Niger, Togo, Sudan and Ethiopia. “Clearly, SMS spam is a bigger problem for users across the African continent,” said Truecaller.

South Africa is one of the most spammed countries in the world: It was 5th in 2017, 4th in 2018 and 6th in 2019. Though it dropped sharply to the 17th position in 2020, it has climbed back to the 9th spot this year.

The US dropped from a high 2nd place in spam calls in 2020 to the 20th place in 2021.

Amongst the top 20 countries affected by spam calls, Brazil is in a class of its own. The next 10 countries in the list have comparable numbers. And the last nine get between 4.5 and 6.7 spam calls per user per month.