15 July, 2017
A survey of Top 20 countries that are affected by various types of spam calls, India is placed much ahead of the USA and the United Kingdom, reveals TrueCaller, the mobile app that tells you who the caller is even if the person is not in your contact list.
She said that Mexico was the sixth affected with 12.2 per cent, Turkey and Peru also by 12.2 per cent, Nigeria with 10.4 per cent; Egypt had 9.9 per cent, United Kingdom and Myanmar with 8.9 per cent.
Kenya was a different case when compared to the other Top 20 countries listed in this research.
"Similar to its regional partner, Kenya, the country of Nigeria also has an issue with scam calls (27 percent), but is plagued more by calls from operators", the company wrote in a statement.
"Many of these operators are seeking to provide special offers for free data, or unlimited calls, which doesn't sound so bad - until you get bombarded by them", the report noted.
In India, most of the spam calls constitute selling data plans and promotions, etc.
"Scam calls are basically fraud attempts via your telephone, with scammers using a phoney scheme to swindle money from unsuspecting members of the public", said the report.
Nigerians also had a problem with telemarketing calls, which stood at two per cent.
Rounding off the spam call list in Nigeria are telemarketing calls at 2%, which are promotional calls from companies, surveys being done by analytics firms on behalf of their clients, political/robo calls, or new client outreach for services and subscriptions.
Interestingly, the maximum number of spam calls Indians get every month is from telecom operators, a whooping 54%, said TrueCaller. It is like you finally won the fight against spam.
The report also said customers in the U.S. and Brazil get about 20 spam calls a month, while in Kenya the average is about seven calls.
For the report, Truecaller aggregated data anonymously from incoming calls that either had been marked as spam by users or automatically been flagged by Truecaller during the period January 1-May 31 this year.
