India’s burgeoning spam calls problem, in 7 charts

A crackdown on fake IMEI numbers will help authorities track lost mobiles. File photo: Rupak De Chowdhuri/Reuters
A crackdown on fake IMEI numbers will help authorities track lost mobiles. File photo: Rupak De Chowdhuri/Reuters

Summary

Time and again, the government keeps introducing new regulations to keep spam callers in check. However, such steps have failed to put an end these pesky calls. Mint explores how spam callers have infiltrated every mode of communication with brazenness.

Spam calls have infiltrated our daily lives with impunity. Many Indians say they block or disconnect three or more spam calls on average each day, according to a survey. The government first took note of the spam call problem as early as 2007, when it introduced the do-not-disturb (DND) facility, but spammers remain one step ahead. In 2010, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) introduced a framework called Telecom Commercial Communication Customers Preference Regulation (TCCCPR) to curb spam calls. Time and again, the government also keeps introducing new regulations to keep spam callers in check. However, such steps have failed to put an end these pesky calls. Mint explores how spam callers have infiltrated every mode of communication with brazenness.

Daily nuisance

Nearly two-thirds of respondents surveyed by LocalCircles last year said they get three or more spam calls every day. This is despite the ambitious do-not-disturb (DND) programme to keep pesky callers at bay: 95% of the respondents who had registered for it still got such calls. The share of those getting more than three spam SMSes a day was nearly 75%.

Spam check

A spam call in India is most likely to sell a financial product (51%), followed by real estate (29%). More than 40% chose to block a spam call, according to the LocalCircles survey. On the other hand, only a tiny fragment (2%) talk to their spammers.

Spam hosts

India is the second biggest source of spam bots after China, according to Spamhaus Project, an organization that tracks spam and related cyber threats. As of 29 March, there were nearly a million spam bots active in the country, which are mainly used for phishing, click-fraud, DDoS and other malicious activities. The project also reported a "badness index" for top-level domains (TLDs are the last few letters of a domain name; common examples include .com, .org and .in). The index is based on the likelihood of domain names with a particular TLD to be used by professional spammers and malware operators.

 

Flooding inboxes

Russia, China and the US were the top three sources of spam emails in the world in 2022, according to the latest Spam and Phishing report released by Securelist. The biggest target of these spam emails were Spain (8.8% of blocked malicious attachments), followed by Russia (7.2%). India accounted for 1.6% of such email attachments.
 

Global menace

The spam call problem is rampant throughout the world. Argentina was the worst affected, where 52% of the calls received were reported as spam on Hiya, a spam detector and caller ID app. In India, the share of unwanted calls was relatively better at 12.7%. Countries such as Ireland, Hungary and Thailand have been successful in tackling the spam call menace, with fewer than 10% of all calls reported as unwanted.

 

 

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