After releasing its first report last year, Truecaller, taking a deeper look into the rising problem of spam calls, has found operators are the biggest spammers across the world.
TheNewsGuru (TNG) reports Truecaller Insights report released on Tuesday revealed this finding.
The report also revealed that telemarketing calls from financial services, debt collectors and insurance related matters are spamming telecoms subscribers globally.
In 2018 alone, the mobile call app helped users to identify and block 17.7 billion spam calls and helped users to identify 74.1 billion calls in general, meaning that close to every fourth call users received were spam.
Truecaller relies on its community of users to report spammers in real time. It is the best way to quickly and easily notify someone across the world to be careful when picking up spam numbers.
“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.
“We could also see that telemarketing calls from financial services, debt collectors and insurance related matters are spamming our users globally.
“It seems to be 2018 was the year of the telemarketers because one number in South Africa made 6.9 million calls from just one number, while in India, a telemarketer made 43 million calls,” Truecaller noted in its report.
In India also, one telemarketer sent 700 million SMS throughout 2018, according to Truecaller.
According to the report, compared to last year, Nigeria dropped off the list of top 20 countries affected by spam calls around the world, with South Africa the only African country in the top 20 list in 2018.
In 2018, 21.7 billion users, 2x more than the amount of last year, made a call using Truecaller. Since the launch of its SMS feature in 2017, users have sent 3.4 billion SMS.
“There has been a rise around the world in spam calls, and as far as we see, it isn’t stopping. Many people are caught off-guard by an unknown phone call or SMS and may spend a lot of time trying to figure out if it’s worth it to pick up or call/text back,” Truecaller stated.
Thankfully, that’s where the mobile call app comes in to help take the stress and mystery away from who is trying to get in touch with you.