India ranking in global scam report goes up to 4th position: Truecaller

India is the country to receive the fourth highest number of spam sales and telemarketing calls. According to Truecaller Global Scam Report 2021, all categories of sales-related calls make up a vast majority (93.5 per cent) of all incoming spam calls.

The report said over 202 million spam calls were made by just one spammer in India this year. That’s over 664,000 calls every day and 27,000 calls every hour of every day.

Truecaller has launched its fifth edition of the annual Global Spam Report - a detailed, global study on how spam and scam affects all of us. The report, like the previous years, 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.

This year, Truecaller has been able to help our 300 million users around the world block and identify 37.8 billion spam calls. Part of the report closely examines the critical trends in spam and scam over the past year, highlights some important numbers, the current landscape and what one can expect in 2022!

Another interesting insight from the report is that 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.

Globally, 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.

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.

In the top 20 countries - Brazil is in a class of its own. The next 10 countries in the list are comparable in terms of number of spam calls received. And the last nine are in a group of their own, between 4.5 to 6.7 spam calls per user per month.