Caller ID service Truecaller has released a new report detailing that spam calls grew by a whopping 300 percent in 2018. What’s interesting to note that even though the volume of spam calls has grown considerably across the globe this year, there has actually been a slight decline in the United States.
Truecaller is a service that many people use on their smartphones to block spam calls. It also has a massive caller ID directory so the app can run an incoming call from an unknown number in its database to surface a match. It says that more than 17.1 billion spam calls were blocked and identified through its app in 2018 while more than 74.1 billion calls, in general, have been identified.
India came at the top of the list of countries affected by spam calls in 2017 and it has now been overtaken by Brazil. The average Truecaller user in that country received 37.5 spam calls every month. Brazil has thus seen an increase of 81 percent in spam calls in one year.
The United States, on the other hand, has dropped from being the second highest country affected by spam calls to the eighth on this list. Even though the volume of spam calls has decreased, the U.S. remains heavily affected by phone scams. The report mentions that one in every 10 American adults lost money due to a phone scam over the past 12 months. The average loss per victim is believed to be $357 for a projected total of $8.9 billion in losses to phone scams.
Filed in . Read more about Apps. Source: blog.truecaller