India's position moved up from ninth to the fourth spot this year in Truecaller’s recently launched fifth edition of the annual Global Spam Report of top 20 countries affected by spam calls, owing to a significant increase in sales and telemarketing calls.
The top most scam in the country remains the popular KYC scam where fraudsters pretend to be a bank, wallet, or digital payment service and ask for user KYC documents. Over 202 million spam calls were made by just one spammer in India between January to October, which is over 6.64 lakh calls every day and 27,000 calls every hour of every day.
Globally, Brazil has 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) and Peru (18.02 calls per user per month) which stands in the second position.
The US dropped from second place in 2020, down to twentieth place in 2021. This year, Truecaller has been able to help India’s 300 million users around the world block and identify 37.8 billion spam calls.
This year’s report has shown that not only has the pandemic affected communication behavior but also spam patterns around the world, with people navigating through the ongoing pandemic and countries going into a second round of lockdown.
