India ranks fourth in most spammed country list

A single spammer in India made over 202 million spam calls between Jan to Oct

India ranks fourth in most spammed country list-CIO&Leader

Scam calls in India have reduced from 9% to 1.4% and some of the common scams in the country still remain the ever-popular KYC & OTP related frauds, according to the fifth edition of the annual Global Spam Report launched by Truecaller – a global study on how spam and scam affects all of us.

Like the previous years, report lists the Top 20 Countries Affected by Spam Calls in 2021.With the people navigating through the ongoing pandemic and countries going into a second round of lockdown, this year’s report has shown that not only has the pandemic affected communication behavior but also spam patterns around the world. 

Talking about trends on a global level, report 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

India has moved up in rankings from 9th to 4th position owing to a significant increase in sales and telemarketing calls. This year, all categories of sales-related calls make up a vast majority (93.5%) of all incoming spam calls, as per the Global Spam Report 202.

Over 202 million spam calls were made by just one spammer in India this year. That’s over 6, 64,000 calls every day and 27,000 calls every hour of every day, stated Truecaller.

One of the most common scams in the country remains the ever-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.

Key trends from other parts of the world

With 32.9 spam calls per user per month, Brazil is still the most spammed country in the world (fourth year in a row) .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. SMS spam has emerged as biggest problem area for users across the African countries.

South Africa was typically one of the most spammed countries in the world: fifth in 2017, fourth in 2018 and sixth in 2019. It dropped sharply to seventeenth place in 2020 and has again jumped back up to ninth place this year. For calls, the US dropped from a high second place in 2020, down to twentieth place in 2021 - almost off the top 20 countries list.


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