Who's Calling? Spam, Scams and Wasted Time

Stu Sjouwerman | Dec 12, 2023

Vishing is Rising ThreatFirst ever insight into those annoying spam calls provides enlightening detail into how many calls are there, where are they coming from, and how much time is wasted dealing with them.

It’s sort of the new normal - never answer your phone if you don’t know the caller and let it go to voicemail. Why? Because of the proliferation of spam calls that nobody wants to receive.

But just how bad is it? Global communications provider, Truecaller, released its’ first Monthly U.S. Spam and Scam Report and there are some interesting bits of detail that give you an idea of just how much effort is being put into these calls that are riddled with scams:

  • Americans receive 2.1 Billion spam calls each month
  • The average American individually gets 5.6 spam calls a month
  • The average spam call is 3.36 minutes long

What’s interesting is where these come from. 90.66% of the calls originate from within the U.S. But of the other nearly 10% of calls, the majority of them (84.5%) originate in India.

I’ve written about Americans being scammed out of hundreds of millions of dollars by India-based call center scams.  So the Truecaller data fits what we’re seeing over here at KnowBe4.

These spam calls are scams. Individuals need to be made aware of the types of scams – similar to how users within an organization should be enrolled in new-school security awareness training. This will lower the effectiveness of these scams and thus undermine these cybercriminal organizations.

KnowBe4 enables your workforce to make smarter security decisions every day. Over 65,000 organizations worldwide trust the KnowBe4 platform to strengthen their security culture and reduce human risk.

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