Indian users received over 202 million spam calls from one phone number: Report

In its annual Global Spam Report, Truecaller wondered how Indian telecom operators even allowed this kind of call volume from one number.

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.

The company noted that the vast majority of all the spam calls in the country were of sales and telemarketing.(Pixabay)

“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.

The company noted that the vast majority of all the spam calls in the country were of sales and telemarketing. The report suggests that KYC (know your customer) scam remained one of the most common scams where fraudsters pretend to be working for a bank or digital payment service and ask for user KYC documents as mandated by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).

Citing multiple users reports to Truecaller, the company said scammers continued to operate in a typical way by targeting unsuspecting victims under some pretext of One-Time Passwords (OTPs), online sales, lotteries and make them download a remote access app that captures sensitive information, leading to a huge loss of money from banks, cards and digital mobile wallets.

According to the report, every user on average received about 17 spam calls per month while spam volumes received by Truecaller users were in excess of 3.8 billion calls in the month of October alone.

With Truecaller users receiving 32.9 spam calls per month, Brazil remained the most spammed country in the world, followed by Peru.

“In a time when the ongoing pandemic continues to impact people as well as countries and is now going into a new round of lockdowns, this year’s report has shown that not only has the pandemic affected communication behavior but also spam, sales and scam patterns around the world," Alan Mamedi, CEO of Truecaller, said in a statement.