A study carried out by the National Telecommunications Agency (Anatel) points to Brazil as a world leader when it comes to unwanted calls.
“Brazil has the highest rate of unwanted calls per capita in the world,” said the vice president of consultancy Neustar, Jon Peterson, during seminar held by Anatel last Thursday (7), with the aim of discussing the use of technology to stop the practice of fraudulent calls in Brazil.
The technology, in this case, is Stir Shaken, used for authentication of the caller ID in the support networks for telephony services, widely used by companies abroad.
This is the third event of the kind led by the agency in Brazil in favor of the use of Stir Shaken to mitigate fraudulent actions such as spoofing, which is a call made by an unidentified number and, in general, applied by criminals who use robots in calls, to impersonate legitimate companies and mislead users.
Brazil, champion of unwanted calls
The ranking presented by the Neustar executive encompasses 20 countries, with Brazil as the leader of the list. However, this is not surprising, given that previous surveys also point to the country’s leadership in such situations.
One survey made by Truecaller of 2021 shows that Brazil is the first country in Latin America when it comes to spam.
Brazil is champion in the ranking of spam calls – Image: Icons8 Team/Unsplash
According to the company, the country maintained the title of “most spam in the world” for four consecutive years, accounting for 32.9 unwanted calls per user per month. And he points out: “there is a significant difference between the average number of spam calls received in Brazil (32.9 calls per user/month) versus Peru (18.02 calls per user/month), which occupies the second position”, says the survey.
In 2018, for example, Brazil was second in the global ranking, second only to the United States, in a ranking also made by Trucaller. However, it still topped the list when the clipping was Latin America, with a number of spam 81% higher than that recorded for 2017.
“To say that Brazil has a spam problem is to say the least. Four years in a row as the most spammy country in the world should be a wake-up call for authorities to start putting in place some heavy restrictions and fines for spam and fraudulent activities,” the Truecaller study said, also reporting that the calls break down into: 44.1% originated from financial services (such as banks, credit unions, credit card companies, loan providers, among others); 39% refer to telesales and another 16.9% are scams.
Or, as Peterson, from Neustar, said at the Anatel seminar: “in Brazil the problem is worse than in other places”. Also according to the executive, the problem of this type of fraudulent call has worsened with the wide adoption of VoIP technology.
Anatel evaluates the adoption of Stir Shaken as a way of mitigating calls like these from spoofing and other scams, but it has already applied other attempts to mitigate arbitrary practices, with the obligation to identify telemarketing numbers with the prefix 0303 — but there are still Much remains to be done if Brazil is to be removed from the leadership in this ranking.
Via: Digital Convergence
