India ranks 4th among nations most affected by spam calls

India has moved up in rankings from ninth to the fourth spot this year in the tally of top 20 countries affected by spam calls, owing to a significant increase in sales and telemarketing calls, as per a report by Truecaller.

This year, all categories of sales-related calls made up a vast majority (93.5 per cent) of all incoming spam calls.

Interestingly, 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.

One of the most common scams in the country remains the popular KYC (know your customer) scam where fraudsters pretend to be a bank, wallet, or digital payment service, asking for user KYC documents as mandated by the Reserve Bank of India.

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.

There is a significant gap between the average number of spam calls received in Brazil (32.9 calls per user per month) versus Peru (18.02 calls per user per month) which stands in the second position, 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.