America’s Spam Scorecard

(NAPSI)—The next time your phone rings, there’s a good chance it will be a spam call—but there are ways you can protect yourself.

The Problem

The average person sees around 9 spam calls a month. According to the experts at Truecaller, a global combatant against spam and fraud, Americans wasted an estimated 272 million hours, (that’s 11 million days, or 373,000 months) answering spam calls in the last 12 months alone. And since the average spam call lasts about 4 minutes, spammers and scammers have plenty of time to trap their victims. 

So, Who’s Calling?

Between regular sales calls, robocalls from legitimate businesses, online surveys, political or donation calls and outright scams, unwanted calls—some with malicious intent—make up a large part of ordinary communication. Among these, most were related to credit card fraud, identity theft, Medicare/insurance, Social Security, car warranty and debt collection.

Where The Calls Come From 

While a majority of spam calls (89.84%) made to Americans originate from within the U.S. (or, at least, seem to), over 75 percent of rest are from India, nearly 5 percent from Nigeria, and the rest mostly from Colombia, South Africa, Mexico and Egypt.

Who Can Help

Truecaller sees it as its mission to empower consumers with the knowledge to protect themselves from unwanted calls and the ability to identify and block them.

What You Can Do

It’s important to install protective software on your mobile devices, just as you would on your computers. To handle spam on Truecaller: Enable the auto-block feature to automatically decline calls from known spammers, manually block numbers by searching for them in the app and marking them as spam, and report suspicious numbers to help Truecaller’s database identify future spam calls. You can also customize your blocking level to choose whether to block only “top spammers” or all identified spam numbers. That way you can answer most calls with the confidence of knowing your phone has screened out the spam. 

In addition, the Federal Communications Commission says:

• Be aware: Caller ID showing a “local” number does not necessarily mean it is .

• Don’t respond to any questions, especially those that can be answered with “Yes.”

• Never give out personal information such as account numbers, Social Security numbers, mother’s maiden names, passwords or other identifying information in response to unexpected calls or if you are at all suspicious.

• If you get an inquiry from someone who says they represent a company or a government agency, hang up and call the phone number on your account statement, or on the company’s or government agency’s website to verify the authenticity of the request. 

Learn More

For further facts on fighting spam and how Truecaller can assist you, visit www.truecaller.com.

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On the Net:North American Precis Syndicate, Inc.(NAPSI)