New Delhi: Over 202 million spam calls were made between January to October this year from just one phone number, according to a new report. Truecaller, a global platform for verifying contacts and blocking unwanted communication, said in its annual Global Spam Report just one phone number disturbed over 664,000 people every day and 27,000 people every hour with spam calls.
“Truecaller actively maintains a list of top spammers in each region in order to automatically block them, but this one spammer is so far ahead of the rest that they will find it very hard to catch up,” the report said, wondering how Indian telecom operators even allowed this kind of call volume.
In a survey of 20 countries impacted by spam calls, India stood at fourth, up from ninth last year, due to a significant rise in sales and telemarketing called, Truecaller’s report said.
In these countries, the average number of spam calls per user per month stood at 16.8, while total spam volumes received by Truecaller users alone are in excess of 3.8 billion calls in October.
Globally, the company said it identified 184.5 billion calls and 586 billion messages. Of those, 37.8 billion spam calls were identified and blocked, while 182 billion messages were identified and blocked. Overall, among all spam call categories, as high as 93.5 per cent were sales-related calls.
In India, the know-your-customer (KYC)-related spam and scam calls, where callers pretend to be officials from a bank, a certain digital wallet, a digital payments service or the RBI, were the most common.
