Truecaller Spam Call Research

Unwanted Calls Blocked

The Truecaller community is made up of over 250 million users, who are avidly blocking calls in real-time that are considered spam. This resulted in 2.5 billion calls to be blocked over the course of 1 year.

With spam calls on the rise, it is important that Truecaller is working hard to keep you protected from unwanted calls and potential fraud. In a study we conducted on Spam Calls in the United States, it was discovered that 27 million Americans lost approximately .34 billion in phone scams during 2015 alone.

Highlights from the report:

• Roughly 27 million Americans reported losing money to phone scams over the last 12 months, a 53% increase from 2014.
• Male millennials are the first ones to fall for scam more than women millennials. Around 38% of men reported to be fooled, and only 17% women.
• 64% of the adults surveyed admit they have not answered an unknown number
• Spam calls cost Americans .4 billion in 2015 – about 3.5 times the amount of advertising sales generated by the Super Bowl in last decade.
• Americans receive 15.8 spam calls (cell and/or landline) and 6.3 spam text messages in an average month.

Top Spammer

While there were over 2.5 billion calls blocked, there was one telecom operator in particular from Egypt who made 7 million calls. Back in May 2016, we made changes to our spam filter algorithm in order to improve the call blocking experience. Before the changes, our spam lists were country based – which means that the algorithm computed a top 2000 list of spammers per country, and top spammer lists were updated daily. 

iOS 10 Callkit Effects Truecaller

With the release of iOS 10, the Callkit integration that allowed Truecaller to feature live Spam Identification, we saw up to 90% increase in spam coverage for iPhone users in certain countries.

For more information about Truecaller studies, please check out our latest TrueInsights or Mobile Operators in India or 2016’s Year in Calling.