Spam calls grows to 300 million per month in India says Truecaller

Spam calls have been around for the longest time and there is still no stopping them. Ignoring them is possibly the next best solution and thanks to the adoption of caller ID and call blocking apps, this has become simpler. According to popular caller ID recognition and call blocking app Truecaller , spam calls in India have increased and more than 300 million such calls take place every month. About 60 million of them originate just from Delhi itself, that’s 15 million spam calls a week in a city. Truecaller says that it is working on improving its spam filter algorithm which earlier used compute a top 2000 list of spammers per country and updated top spammer lists daily. This wasn’t relevant to a particular user as he/she would get more calls from within their rather than all around the country. To provide a more relevant list, the company has done some updates so that the lists go deep down to the regional level. This has proven to improve the chances of capturing a spam call and has proved to be successful in India and globally. In India and the US around 70 percent of spam calls are captured by Truecaller’s automatic spam filter, it goes upto 90 percent in Nigeria and Egypt. In India, the top 10 regions (by number of incoming spam calls), are said to have seen improvement in spam filter effectiveness after the introduction of their new algorithm. The percentage for Delhi has gone up from 53% to 70%, while Gujarat sees an improvement from 58% to 83%. Truecaller has been one of the most useful tools on smartphones today but recognition only solves half the problem. While users can identify spam calls, this doesn’t necessarily solve the problem, as you still get those spam calls which can get annoying. Hopefully TRAI will look at this statistics and take some actions to put a check on the number of spam calls.