This may sound unbelievable, but it’s true. Over 202 million spam calls were made by just one spammer in India this year — that is, over 6,64,000 calls every day or 27,000 calls every hour of every day.
According to a global report by Truecaller, a mobile platform for verifying contacts, 93.5 per cent of all spam calls in India are for sales or telemarketing (users have tagged these calls as operator, referring to an origin from one of the large telecom providers or telemarketing calls).
KYC, the common scam
“One of the common scams in the country remains the ever-popular KYC (know your customer) scam where fraudsters pretend to be a bank or digital payment service, asking for user KYC documents as mandated by the Reserve Bank of India,” the company said in its 2021 Global Spam and Scam Report.
In addition, multiple user reports to Truecaller mention that the typical modus operandi of scammers in India is to lure unsuspecting victims under some pretext (OTPs, online sales, lotteries) and get them to download a remote access app that eventually leads to a huge loss of money from their bank accounts, credit cards and mobile wallets.
“The average number of spam calls per user per month stands at 16.8 while total spam volumes received by Truecaller users alone are in excess of 3.8 billion calls in just October,” it said.
The company said it actively maintains a list of top spammers in each region 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.
“This report is the result of painstaking analysis of billions of calls received by 300 million users. Truecaller users have the opportunity to name spammers or tag calls with an appropriate business or identity, helping us assign percentages to different kinds of spam calls,” the company said in the report.
Anonymised calls/SMS
No content of any call or SMS is heard or read by anyone or any machine at Truecaller. All data is aggregated, anonymised and can never be traced to any one user, it added.
