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India comes out as the fourth-highest number of spam sales and telemarketing calls receiver country in the world. The revelation came from the Swedish caller identification and spam blocking app startup Truecaller’s Global Scam Report 2021.

In the report, India finds its place right behind Brazil, Peru and Ukraine. According to the report, sales-related calls made up a vast majority (93.5%) of all incoming spam calls in the country. The report also made a special mention of a single number in India which apparently made over 202 Mn spam calls—more than 664,000 calls every day or 27,000 calls every hour.

According to the report, two kinds of telephone phishing scams are very popular in the country. The first is KYC (know your customer) fraud, where scammers target potential victims by pretending to be from their bank and asking for their personal documents.

Another scam technique involves luring potential victims into downloading a remote access app under a false pretence (online sales, lottery wins etc.) and then using this access to steal money from their bank accounts. 

In India, each user received an average of 16.8 scam calls per month, in comparison to more than 3.8 Bn calls made during the month of October.

The report is based on the calls received by more than 300 Mn Truecaller users around the world. These users can name spammers or tag calls as spam calls on the app when they receive them. The Swedish business then aggregates and anonymises this data for its report.  

In this year’s report, Brazil retained its numero uno position as the most spam callers country in the world by a large margin. Brazilian Truecaller users receive an average of 32.9 spam calls per month compared to 18.02 in Peru, which comes second on the list.