This spam monster made 202 m calls in 2021

This may increasingly sound unbelievable, but it surely’s true. Over 202 million spam calls have been made by only one spammer in India this 12 months — that’s, over 6,64,000 calls every single day or 27,000 calls each hour of every single day.

In response to a worldwide report by Truecaller, a cellular platform for verifying contacts, 93.5 per cent of all spam calls in India are for gross sales or telemarketing (customers have tagged these calls as operator, referring to an origin from one of many giant telecom suppliers or telemarketing calls).

KYC, the frequent rip-off

“One of many frequent scams within the nation stays the ever-popular KYC (know your buyer) rip-off the place fraudsters faux to be a financial institution or digital cost service, asking for consumer KYC paperwork as mandated by the Reserve Financial institution of India,” the corporate mentioned in its 2021 International Spam and Rip-off Report.

As well as, a number of consumer reviews to Truecaller point out that the everyday modus operandi of scammers in India is to lure unsuspecting victims underneath some pretext (OTPs, on-line gross sales, lotteries) and get them to obtain a distant entry app that finally results in an enormous lack of cash from their financial institution accounts, bank cards and cellular wallets.

“The typical variety of spam calls per consumer monthly stands at 16.8 whereas whole spam volumes acquired by Truecaller customers alone are in extra of three.8 billion calls in simply October,” it mentioned.

The corporate mentioned it actively maintains a listing of prime spammers in every area to robotically block them, however this one spammer is up to now forward of the remainder that they may discover it very laborious to catch up.

“This report is the results of painstaking evaluation of billions of calls acquired by 300 million customers. Truecaller customers have the chance to call spammers or tag calls with an acceptable enterprise or id, serving to us assign percentages to totally different sorts of spam calls,” the corporate mentioned within the report.

Anonymised calls/SMS

No content material of any name or SMS is heard or learn by anybody or any machine at Truecaller. All knowledge is aggregated, anonymised and may by no means be traced to anybody consumer, it added.