Spam calls in the US spiked in October, according to Truecaller’s annual Global Spam Report. The report observed that Truecaller customers in the US received 3,115,861 spam calls in October. The researchers note that a user in the US receives an average of 4.8 spam calls per month, totalling approximately 1.4 billion calls across the country every month.
Interestingly, the report found that, while the US was the second most-spammed country in 2020, it dropped to the twentieth place on the list in 2021. This wasn’t due to a decrease in spam in the US, however, but was instead the result of an increase in spam calls in other countries. The researchers offer the following findings about spam calls around the world:
“Over 202 million spam calls were made by just one spammer in India. That's over 664,000 people that were disturbed by spam calls every day and 27,000 people every hour - from just one phone number.
“Brazil has retained its title of the most spammed country in the world (four years in a row) with 32.9 spam calls per user per month. There is a significant gap between the average number of spam calls received in Brazil (32.9 calls per user per month) versus Peru (18.02 calls per user per month), which stands in the second position.
“The rankings look very different when comparing the average number of incoming spam calls, vs. SMS messages per user per month. Cameroon tops the list, followed by Somalia, Tanzania, Congo, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Benin, and more. SMS spam is largely affecting users across the African continent.
“South Africa was typically one of the most spammed countries in the world: fifth in 2017, fourth in 2018 and sixth in 2019. It dropped sharply to seventeenth place in 2020 and has again jumped back up to ninth place this year.
“In the top 20 countries - Brazil is in a class of its own. The next 10 countries in the list are comparable in terms of number of spam calls received. And the last nine are in a group of their own, between 4.5 to 6.7 spam calls per user per month.
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