New Delhi: Telecom operator Bharti Airtel on Monday said that its network flagged a staggering 8 billion spam calls and called out 0.8 billion spam SMSes within two and a half months of the launch of its spam-fighting AI-powered solution. Delhi had the dubious distinction of accounting for a maximum number of the spam calls received and originated, the company said in a statement.
The telecom major, in the last 2.5 months, has alerted close to 252 million unique customers to these suspicious calls and has observed that there has been a 12 per cent decline in the number of customers answering them. “We observed that a staggering 35 per cent of the spammers have used landline telephones. Customers in Delhi have received the maximum number of spam calls, followed by customers in Andhra Pradesh and Western Uttar Pradesh,” the company said.
Leveraging an advanced algorithm, the AI-powered network has successfully identified close to 1 million spammers every day, the company informed in a release. Notably, six per cent of all calls and two per cent of all SMSes on the Airtel network have been identified as spam.
As far as metro cities are concerned, Airtel observed that Delhi is also where the maximum number of spam calls have originated, followed by Mumbai and Karnataka. In terms of SMSes (text messages), the maximum number have originated in Gujarat followed by Kolkata and Uttar Pradesh and the maximum number of customers targeted have been from Mumbai, Chennai and Gujarat.
As per the trends, 76 per cent of all spam calls have been targeted at male customers. Additionally, distinct differences have been noted in terms of spam call frequency across age demographics. “Customers in the age bracket of 36-60 have received 48 per cent of all spam calls, while those in the 26-35 age bracket have been the second-most targeted, accounting for 26 per cent of spam calls,” the company said, adding that just about 8 per cent of the spam calls have landed in the handsets of senior citizens.
Moreover, there is a notable disparity in the frequency of spam calls between weekdays and weekends. “The volume of these calls diminishes by around 40 per cent on Sundays. Specifically, devices in the price range of Rs 15,000-20,000 are the recipients of approximately 22 percent of all spam calls,” the company said.
The government has allocated 10-digit numbers with the prefix 160 for service and transactional calls. “Customers can expect to receive calls from these 160-prefix series assigned to banks, mutual funds, insurance companies, stockbrokers, other financial institutions, corporates, enterprises, SMEs, big and small businesses used for making transactional and service calls,” it added.
