One out of every three women in India receive offensive and inappropriate calls or SMSs, reveals a Truecaller report.
According to the report ‘Understanding the Impact of Harassment & Spam Calls on Women’, 78 percent women receive harassment calls with inappropriate and sexual content and 82 percent receive  unsolicited videos and pictures with inappropriate and sexual content at least once a week.  About 50 percent of such calls and texts are from anonymous people, 11 percent are by stalkers and 3 percent come from known people.

The report notes the state of harassment calls made to women, their severity, steps women can take to prevent such calls, encourage women facing harassment and spam to ‘Call It Out’.

According to the survey most women viewed cold calls from telemarketers, salespeople and fraudsters, a ‘nuisance.’ About 81 percent women felt that blank calls were ‘harassment’. Two- third (65%) women reported feeling angry or irritated by harassment calls, one-fourth (22%) felt troubled, worried or offended.

As far as addressing such calls is concerned, only 10% filed a complaint to the police and 7% named and shamed the spammer on social media. About two –third (62 percent) women took measures against these calls. 65 percent blocked the harasser’s number, 48 percent installed a call blocking app, 41% percent searched for the number online.

It says that India plagued by the highest number of spam calls in the world with the average Truecaller user receiving 22.6 spam calls per month followed by USA and Brazil.

“With India’s ever-expanding payments landscape , phishing calls collecting payment information have become rampant.  Seventy two percent of the surveyed women said they received calls from fraudsters seeking to collect payments or sensitive personal data at least once a week with 4% receiving counterfeit calls almost daily,” it said.

The survey was conducted by Truecaller in collaboration Ipsos Research, India during January 20-February 22, 2018 on 2,004 women aged 15-35 across 15 cities in India.