Truecaller Around the Globe – Part 2: Spam Calls in the US

Continuing our tour of mobile markets, which we started last week in

, we now to go the US.

Truecaller In the US By The Numbers:

• Our users has reported more than 370.000 numbers of spam to our database

?It just suddenly showed up in my inbox, without me ever doing anything. A really tacky message claiming I?ve won a new iPhone in a contest or something. Judging of the serial of the number, it probably originated from another country.?

– Sara 16, student from San Antonio.

As one of the most mature mobile markets in the world, US users have had almost three decades of mobile telecommunication. Therefore, it is not strange that as much as 86% of US adults have their own mobile phone. However it?s not just common among adults, many children gets introduced to mobile phone technology at a very young age. This early adaptation is also noticeable in the user statistics, when the average teenager sends and receives up to 60 messages a day! The quick information retrieval offered in various ways by a modern mobile telephone may be one explanation as to why children today are more likely to own a mobile phone than a book.

Along with a high teledensity, as is the case in the US, there comes the problem with spam messages and spam calls. And it?s a rising problem, with a yearly growth of 45 % to 4.5 billion spam text messages in 2011 alone. It’s not unusual that the sending number of much of the spam is located outside the US. Truecaller helps this problem because it allows American user to do searches on numbers that are not just domestic but also international. This can be an enormous benefit for all of those who on a regular basis receive offers on everything from hygiene products to traveling arrangements.

?The spam problem is insane in US. I was getting 15-20 text messages a day with crap. Also telemarketers were killing me. And somebody else named Jose had previously owned the phone number I got from AT&T and I was getting called all the time by these Mexican guys/girls that didn’t believe me I wasn’t Jose. It’s really good to have spam call filtering because, at least in California, you get charged for receiving calls too.?

– Lorin 28, system administrator from Palo Alto.

Spammers are really good at what they do, so it?s important to stay ahead of them. Spammers often use prepaid phones that can?t be traced back to the sender so they can then use auto-dialing technology to reach recipients. Spam and young users are a bad mix, and that is where Truecaller is trying to help.