A Single Spammer in India made over 202 million spam calls between January to October in India this year — that makes over 6,64,000 calls every day or 27,000 calls every hour of every day, Truecaller, a global platform for verifying contacts and blocking unwanted communication, said in its annual Global Spam Report.
The report, wondering how Indian telecom operators even allowed this kind of call volume, said, “Truecaller actively maintains a list of top spammers in each region in order 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.” Truecaller Crosses 300 Million Active Users Globally
The report further states that, India moved from the ninth to the fourth position in the list of top 20 most spammed countries. The increase in spam calls was mostly due to a rise in sales and telemarketing calls, which made up 93.5 percent of all incoming spam calls.
The report further shows that KYC (know your customer) scam remained one of the most common scams where fraudsters pretend to be working for a bank or digital payment service and ask for user KYC documents as mandated by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).
Truecaller, citing reports from its users, mentioned that scammers in India mostly attempt to lure unsuspecting victims under the pretext of OTPs, online sales or lotteries. They try to get their target to download a remote access app that can eventually conduct remote code executions, helping the threat actor to gain access to the victim’s system. WhatsApp’s Upcoming Feature Will Soon Allow Group Admins To Delete Messages for Everyone: Report
Globally, Brazil continues to remain the the most spammed country in the world with 32.9 spam calls per user per month. Truecaller users received 184.5 billion calls and 586 billion messages. Of these, users identified and blocked 37.8 billion spam calls and 182 billion messages. Truecaller has 300 million users across the globe.
(The above story first appeared on Morning Tidings on Dec 21, 2021 09:28 AM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website morningtidings.com).
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