Brazil surpassed India to become the most spammed country in the world in 2018, according to a report from popular communication app Truecaller on Tuesday. More than 6% of overall calls received by Indian users in 2018 were spam calls. However, the average number of spam calls received in India dropped to 22.3 calls per user/month - 1.5% less than last year, the findings showed. On an average, a Truecaller user in Brazil received 37.5 spam calls per month - an 81% increase of spam calls in a year, said the "Truecaller Insight Special Report".
Chile, South Africa and Mexico are the three other countries among the list of top five countries affected by spam calls this year. With regard to spam call categorisation, operators and telecom service providers continue to be the top spammers in India with 91% user calls received for the upselling of various offers and balance reminders, Truecaller said in a statement.
"Looking into this year’s breakdown of call categorisation in India there has been a substantial increase of spam calls coming from operators/telecom service providers upselling various offers and balance reminders. Also, it seems like scam calls have more than doubled compared to last year – from 3% to 7%, which is very alarming," said Truecaller in the statement.
This is followed by scam callers and telemarketers who garnered seven per cent and two per cent of such calls respectively. Truecaller said it identified and blocked 17.7 billion spam calls globally, where every fourth call that users received was a spam call.
For the unaware, Truecaller is the popular Caller ID service which works on the user's database. In 2018, Truecaller introduced various new features to the platform including Truecaller Pay in India, Who Viewed Your Profile and so on. Truecaller is one of the most downloaded apps by Indian users as it not only identifies spam calls but also helps users in staying away from spam messages.
