Spam calls from annoying telemarketers, spammers, fraudsters and automated pre-recorded robocalls have become a blight on the communication landscape.
According to a report from Truecaller, a global caller-ID service, in 2018 spam calls grew by 300 percent worldwide. The report shows that in total, over 17 billion spam calls were made around the world this year. The report counted a call as spam if it was flagged by algorithms or manually by users.
While the number of spam calls have increased overall, some countries such as the United States witnessed a decline. The US fell from the second most spammed country in 2017 to the eighth, with the average number of spam calls declining from 21 a year earlier to 17 this year. One probable reason for the decline is the increasing crack down on illegal callers by the authorities. The US Federal Trade Commission has brought several lawsuits, while the Federal Communications Commission has considered various regulations to deal with the issue and in one case slapped an egregious robo-caller with an $82 million fine.
However, in many other countries the number of spam calls have escalated. Brazil was found to be most spammed country in the world with an average of 37 spam calls a month, including calls from telecom operators and from campaigners in the recent general election. India came in second spot, down one notch from its most spammed country status in 2017.
Since Truecaller did not include data outside its customer base, the reported figure of 17 billion only reflects a portion of the spam calls that are being made in total worldwide. Another robocall blocking service called YouMail reported 28.5 million spam calls occurring just in the US within the first eight months of this year.
There are several ways to avoid the nuisance of spam calls, you could try reporting the number to your telecom operator or government telecommunication regulator. Alternatively, on your own phone, go to the Recent Calls section and long press on the troublesome number, and choose block. On some Android phones, you will also be given the option of reporting the number as spam.
There are also a number of monthly or annual subscription services such as Nomorobo, RoboKiller, Hiya, and others designed to prevent robocalls from ever ringing your phone. At their core, these services rely on a constantly updating list of robocallers, spammers, and fraudsters and use that database to stop nuisance calls. When a call comes in, the service runs it against their database of scam numbers and shuts down the call if it is identified as a spam call.
Samsung’s recent Galaxy S and Note smartphones, as well as Google’s Pixel branded smartphones automatically flag suspected spam calls right as they come in. Google phones even turn the entire screen red as a visual warning of ‘do not answer’. Additionally, on both Android and iOS, you can set the Do Not Disturb mode to allow phone calls from only those people and businesses in your contacts list. This is a pretty drastic, sledgehammer solution to the problem of robocalls, as you will most certainly miss some calls that you like to answer.
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