According to the annual Truecaller Insights Report that listed the top 20 countries affected by spam calls in 2019, there has been a significant shift in the ranking of countries that received the most spam calls.
India has dropped down to the fifth position in terms of the number of spam calls received by users globally, while Brazil continues to stay on top. At one point, India was the top spammed country in the world.
However, spam calls received by users in India increased by 15% from the previous year – spam calls in India amount to 25.6 calls per user/month.
In terms of spam call categorization, operators continue to be the top spammers in India with 67% user calls received for upselling of various offers and reminders. Telemarketing services emerged as big spammers recording 17% of all spam calls while 10% of spam calls came from financial service providers. The pattern is similar across other big markets.
Another pattern noted was that scam calls are on the rise globally. Also, during this year, 1 out of 3 women in India receive sexual harassment or inappropriate calls and SMS on a regular basis.
The data for this report was aggregated anonymously from incoming calls that were either marked as spam by users – or automatically flagged by Truecaller during the period of January 1 – October 30, 2019. During this period, Truecaller identified 116 billion calls and 8.6 billion spam SMS globally.