Interestingly, telemarketing, which is often pointed fingers at when customers get spammed, constituted just 2 percent of the spam calls in 2018, down from 13 percent in 2017
Nearly 91 percent of all spam calls in India in 2018 (January to October) were made telecom service providers, the Financial Express reported citing a Truecaller report.
Interestingly, telemarketing, which is often pointed fingers at when customers get spammed, constituted just 2 percent of the spam calls in 2018, down from 13 percent in 2017.
Spam calls from telecom companies have increased drastically in 2018 compared to last year when they accounted for 54 percent of the total number.
Telecom operators often call customers to make various offers and remind them to recharge their accounts, Truecaller observed.
Read — Truecaller introduces call recording functionality for Android users
According to the study, spam calls in India have more than doubled compared to last year and now constitute 7 percent of the total number of calls made in the country, as against 3 percent earlier.
However, Brazil has pipped India to become the most spammed country in the world, with the average Truecaller user receiving 37.5 spam calls per month.
Truecaller, which has a user base of around 300 million across the globe, helped its users identify a total of 74.1 billion calls between January and October. Around 17.7 billion of them were spam calls.
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Truecaller's report is based on data from the top 20 countries affected by spam calls in 2018. The data was aggregated anonymously from incoming calls that have either been marked as spam by users or have automatically been flagged by Truecaller.
"Digging deeper into the bigger markets, we found common categories that tie all these spam calls together. The biggest pattern we could see was that operators across the world are the biggest spammers," Truecaller said in its report.
Read — TRAI overhauls rules on pesky calls, spam messages; spells out obligation of telcos
Meanwhile, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has revamped the regulations on pesky calls and spam as it spelt out new rules mandating subscribers' consent for receiving telemarketing messages.
The regulator has also asked telecom operators to ensure that commercial communication takes place only through registered senders.
