India Among Top-10 Spammed Countries; Gujarat, Maha, Andhra Top-3 Spammed States

Truecaller, a caller identification app with over 150 million monthly active users in India, has released a report titled "Truecaller Insights: Top 20 Countries Affected by Spam Calls in 2020" and according to this Indian telecom operators accounted for 52% of all spam calls in the country in 2020, followed by telemarketers, who comprised another 34%.

Global Spam Trends 2020 -

• Brazil is still the most affected country when it comes to spam calls, with an increase of 9% compared to last year.
• The US is now the second most spammed country in the world, and has seen a 56% increase of spam calls compared to last year. This is a significant rise from last year’s position of 8th. 
• India, a country that used to receive the most spam calls in the world, has now dropped to 9th position. 
• Last year, the South American region dominated the top 10 most spammed countries list. This year Chile, Peru and Colombia have seen a decrease in spam calls.
• A lot of European countries have surfaced on the list – Hungary, Poland, Spain, UK, Ukraine, Germany, Romania, Greece and Belgium. None of these countries were on the list last year. 
• The biggest increase of spam calls comes from Europe and the US – where Hungary has seen the biggest jump (1132%), followed by Germany (685%), Belgium (557%) and Romania (395%).
• Indonesia (18.3), India (16.8), Vietnam (14.7) and Russia (14.3) are the most affected countries in Asia. 
• An escalation of scam calls and robocalls around the world is expanding their share within the most common spam categories. Scammers taking advantage of the pandemic is a reason for the increase of scam calls.
• Just like us, spammers take time off from work on weekends, as can be seen in a global weekly reduction of spam calls on those days.

Spam reached its lowest point in April, when strict curfews and lock downs were implemented worldwide. The overall volume of calls also dipped during this period. However, from this point, reports of scammers taking advantage of the uncertainty around the pandemic emerged. In May, spam calls started to pick up again and have been increasing on average by 9.7% per month.

October, with a record high in terms of spam calls, was 22.4% higher than the pre-lockdown period.

Despite a reduction in the amount of spam calls received (34%), India still makes it into the top 10 most spammed countries. Only 3 years ago, India was ranked as the most spammed country in the world.

Truecaller data shows that 98.5% of all spam calls in India come from domestic numbers. This could partly explain why the total number of spam calls have decreased in India as compared to previous years. This means that the strict curfews and lockdowns in India made it impossible for telemarketers to go to work, or utilize the equipment they need to carry out large scale spam campaigns.

Overall, the spam trends look very similar to last year with the exception that scam calls in particular increased from 6% to 9%. Based on community feedback and internal reports, we have noticed a very particular type of scam in India that seems to gain traction each year. We are talking, of course, about KYC and OTP related scams. They are now so common that even you may have experienced this yourself or know of someone who has. The scammers try to hook unsuspecting people using either phone calls or SMS and the tactic is always the same: they will try to get you to give up sensitive information about your financials or force you to you reveal a secret OTP with the ultimate aim of extracting money from your bank accounts or digital wallets.

Another interesting fact: In the first 3 months of lockdown in India calls to emergency services spiked by 148% at the beginning of the lockdown.

Google Hit by Indian Spam Network Using Millions of Gmail Accounts

Spammers have unfortunately become a part of our online lives. Whether you're a public figure or a common man, if any of your social media profiles is public, we're sure you would have been a victim of spamming some way or another. Of course, when you're a public figure, the degree of spamming is to another level altogether.

Online merchants all over the world have recently been victim to one such spamming activity. According to them, in the recent past, they have been seeing a humongous increase in the usage of their subscription boxes and contact forms all coming from a myriad of IP addresses having origination in the Indian sub-continent.

While some of them despised this as them being more popular in India than any other part of the world, others decided to dig deeper. After a careful with examination of the situation, one of the online merchants realised that all these email addresses were using Google's Gmail account. While anyone around the world can easily fill out a form, using a Gmail email address that wasn't real, what was interesting was the fact that almost half of these accounts had to follow the DOUBLE-OPT IN process in order to complete the registration for an email newsletter. This meant, the Gmail addresses must have had someone on the other end who is clicking on the confirmation link to complete the registration process.

A number of list hosts have acknowledged that this spamming is indeed a widespread problem, affecting a huge number of publishers all around the world. In addition to this, they have also pointed out to the fact that a large number of these emails had been opened, meaning a bot attack as a culprit was out of question. This was a work of a large network of Gmail accounts created in order to spam the websites.

While Google has been made aware of the situation, there hasn't been a concrete reply from the tech giant till date. The biggest irony in the entire matter is the fact that a number of online publishers consider Gmail as one of the most problematic services when it comes down to getting their DOUBLE-OPT IN emails to legitimate subscribers. Gmail ends up segregating their emails and sticking them into spam and promotional folders, making it almost virtually impossible for the communication to reach the user.

We guess, in the effort to keep its Gmail users away from spammers, Google forgot about taking care of the amount of spamming coming from their own Gmail users. It's time for Google to acknowledge this problem and find a solution to fix it as soon as possible.

[Top Image - rmnoa357 / Shutterstock.com]