BlogNewsA Year in Calling: How the World Communicated Using Truecaller in 2017

A Year in Calling: How the World Communicated Using Truecaller in 2017

Lindsey LaMont

Dec 12, 20174 min readEdited on Oct 8, 2018

Take a look at Truecaller’s Year in Calling to discover how the world communicated using Truecaller in 2017!

Truecaller has been a powerhouse when it comes to saving people from spammers, identifying new numbers, and making better business communication. We’ve heard stories of Truecaller connecting long lost friends, finding significant others, and even identifying criminals. Truecaller is truly an app that comes in handy for various situations.

Throughout the year, we have been releasing Truecaller Insights reports on a monthly basis which dive in various statistics of spam call patterns, e-commerce competition, banking, and other insights. However, for our users, it’s also quite fun to take statistics on calling patterns (anonymously aggregated). You can see 2016’s Year in Calling here.

Here is your Year in Calling

Every year we analyze how Truecaller helps people through calls, and we are excited this year to add in our newest feature, which is our SMS app! In 2017, Truecaller users have made Truecaller their default dialer, which resulted in 10 billion calls have been made! That’s 5x more than the amount made last year. See full site here: truecaller.com/year-in-calling

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Scams have been on the rise around the world and can become easy to target those who are caught off-guard by a phone call or SMS. In the U.S., every year we see the IRS Scams, and premium-rate scams known as the ‘One Ring Scam’, which has recently been copied for disrupting Sweden with premium rate calls and fake bank SMS. These scams are an easy way to cheat people because it plays with curiosity but also on the fear of missing out on something important.

This year, Truecaller users have reported and identified 40 million unique spam numbers. The Truecaller app replies on the community to report spammers in real time. It is the best way to quickly and easily notify someone across the world to be careful when picking up spam numbers.

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Somalia takes home the gold prize for the second year in a row for the country that makes the most calls per person! The average Truecaller Somali user makes roughly 19 calls per day, and receives 14 calls! In contrast, Argentina doesn’t seem to talk very much on the phone – they slide in last place with their incoming and outgoing calls. (Note: this information was calculated anonymously and no context was read)

Tags are put in place to give more context to what a call might be about. You can tag a number based on a broad range of categories such as Transportation, Banking / Finance, services (and more!), making it even easier, for example, to ID your cab driver or your bank when they call. Our top tags around the world are banks, doctors, telcos, real estate brokers, and taxis. The tags most popular last year was restaurants and hotels!

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While we have identified over 40 million spammers this year, let’s break that down and have a closer look at our top spammers of the year. It seems to be 2017 was the year of the telcos, because one number in Nigeria connected with a telco made 38 million calls! In India, another telco made 31 million calls from just one number.

Messaging

In contrast to the #1 spammers in calling, India takes the gold medal when it comes to sending SMS. One telco sent 53 million!

Since we launched messaging in April, our users have sent over 639 million SMS to friends, family, and new contacts around the world!

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Guess who sent the most SMS messages this year? Tanzania! The average user from Tanzania sends approximately per day, and receives about 16! And who sends the least? Sorry, Chile, you come in last for when it comes to being active in SMS.

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Spam SMS is a huge issue in many countries around the world. In recent trips to India this year, our team discovered even with a new sim card, they would be plagued with SMS messages from telcos. It is no wonder that the telco category happens to be some of the biggest spammers according to our data.

So, how many messages did Truecaller identify and block since the launch of the SMS app? About 3 billion. That is around 500 million per month since launching the app in April!

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Notes and methodology

The data in this article was aggregated anonymously from incoming and outgoing calls during the period of January 1st, 2017 to October 31, 2017, and for messages data was anonymously aggregated from incoming and outgoing messages from April 1, 2017 to October 31, 2017 to understand the trends and usage. No context of any calls or messages was read. These insights are purely based on our internal data and does not reflect the entire usage of any of the services and Truecaller does not warrant the accuracy or completeness of such data, and all derivative conclusions or assumption are those of the readers only.

 

 

 

Lindsey LaMont

Dec 12, 20174 min read

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