Global Spam Report: KYC most common scam in India, Brazil most spammed country
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 the month of October, the Global Spam Report revealed.
India moved up in rankings from ninth to the fourth spot this year in the tally of top 20 countries affected by spam calls, according to a new report. This happened because of a significant increase in sales and telemarketing calls, as per the Global Spam Report released by Truecaller, a global platform for verifying contacts and blocking unwanted communication.
The report presented an interesting insight, that the popular KYC (know your customer) scam remains one of the most common one in the country. As part of the scam, fraudsters pretend to be representatives of banks, wallets, or digital payment services, asking for user KYC documents as mandated by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).
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 the month of October.
At a global level, Truecaller 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.
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.
Another interesting insight from the report is that over 202 million spam calls were made by just one spammer in India this year between January to October - which is over 6.64 lakh calls every day and 27,000 calls every hour of every day.
“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.
In terms of incoming spam messages per user per month, Cameroon topped the list, followed by Somalia, Tanzania, Congo, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, and Benin.