Annoying Spam Calls Jumped Over 300% in 2018

It may be small consolation but those irritating spam calls coming in on your phone multiple times a day, every day, are also annoying mostly everyone else, too.
 
A report recently issued by the Stockholm-based phone number-identification service, Truecaller, found that spam calls grew at a rate of 300% over the past year. The study largely points the metaphorical finger at telecom operators for this intrusive uptick of calls.
 
Between January and October of 2018, some 17.7 billion spam calls were placed to people across the world. That’s up from 5.5 billion calls in 2017, according to Truecaller.
 
The service looked at aggregated data of incoming calls that customers labeled as spam as well as others automatically flagged as known spam.
 
Brazil was the most spammed nation, the study found, with the average citizen receiving 37 calls per month, with 32% of those calls coming directly from telecom operators.
 
U.S. residents, however, saw a decline in the number of spam calls they had to field each month this year; which were down to just under an average of 17 each month from last year’s nearly 21 per.

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