Telecom Operators Are Biggest Spammers In Sri Lanka: Report

Caller ID and spam detection app, Truecaller recently announced some revealing stats on spam and scam calls in Sri Lanka.

The recently published Truecaller insights: ‘Top Spammers in Sri Lanka in 2017’ report reveals that Telecom operators are the biggest spammers in the country with 72 percent for reported spam calls.

“Operator spam calls involve telecom companies cold calling people,” the report said.

“During these type of calls, call centre agents attempt to upsell data plans or push promotional offers to the public at large.”

Another major spam call problem that Sri Lankans have to deal with is scam calls, these accounted for 22 percent of all spam calls.

Scam calls are basically attempts to defraud you via your telephone, with scammers using a phony scheme to swindle money from unsuspecting members of the public.

Recently the ‘one ring scam’ also popularly called the ‘Wangiri phone scam’ affected many Sri Lankans.

Rounding off the spam call list in Sri Lanka are nuisance calls at 3 percent, these kinds of spam calls in general are unwanted and unsolicited calls that are a disturbance for users, or at the very least amount to prank calls and at worst, harassment.

The rest of the listed spam calls were constituted by financial services (3%) such as banking product offers, unsolicited credit union calls or credit card companies cold dialing people.

Unwanted spam calls are on the rise around the globe, and the situation is no different in Sri Lanka.

The report also reveals that in Sri Lanka there is a 92 percent increase in spam calls between January to December this year.

Truecaller says these data were aggregated anonymously from incoming calls that either have been marked as spam by users or automatically been flagged by Truecaller during the period of 1st January 2017 to 6th of November 2017.

As for the type of spam calls users receive the most, Truecaller has looked at the top 100 spammers in each region for the month October and November.

In Sri Lanka most operators offer the service of blocking calls via SMS or USSD code.

“However, this comes with a price and also requires effort in order to remember the SMS number or USSD codes for activation of the service,” the report said.

“Truecaller makes it simple for everyone to look at their Caller ID and know who’s calling, even if the number is not stored in their phonebook.”

Truecaller says their Android and iOS app has helped its users in Sri Lanka identify over 8.5 million spam calls, just this year alone.

Courtesy : LBO