Indian users received 2x times more scam calls in 2018: Truecaller

Truecaller, today released its annual ‘Truecaller Insight Special Report’ that listed the top 20 spam-plagued countries in 2018. According to the report, India has moved to the second position in terms of number of spam calls received by users while Brazil topped the list. One of the interesting revelations that came from this report was that scam calls in India has doubled in the past year, increasing from 3% to an alarming 7% mark.  In terms of spam calls, the report divulges, that 6.1% of overall calls received by Indian users in 2018 were spam calls.  However, the average spam calls received per user in India has dropped to 22.3 calls per user/month which is 1.5% less than previous compared to last year.

With regard to spam call categorization, operators and telecom service providers continue to be the top spammers in India with 91% user calls received for the upselling of various offers and balance reminders. This is followed by scam callers and telemarketers who garnered 7% and 2% respectively. Out of this, Truecaller has been successful in identifying and blocking 20.2b calls.

Truecaller has identified and blocked 17.7 billion spam calls globally, where every fourth call that users received was a spam call. Brazil has taken over India as the most spammed country in the world with an 81% increase from the previous year. The caller categorization considered in the report includes operators, scam, nuisance, financial services, insurance, telemarketers, debt collectors, political, robocall and e-commerce.

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