Nuisance and cold calls are still a distressing problem in many countries. Every single day, phone numbers are reported by users at the online platform tellows.co.uk with the purpose of warning each other of any possible risk calls. Recently, tellows conducted a study to analyse various types of calls in different countries. As an online community to provide information about telephone numbers, tellows aims to find out which caller types are often reported by the users in different countries.The different caller types include harassment calls, aggressive advertising, telemarketer, survey, ping calls, debt collection company, sweepstakes and unknown. Every caller type indicates the purpose of the call for every number. The caller types help users figuring out what kind of call to expect when a certain telephone number calls. Nine countries, in which tellows has a high number of users, were analysed and compared with each other. As a result, harassment calls are the most frequently reported caller type in 4 out of 9 countries, including the UK. Telemarketing also had a high percentage on the chart, showing that it’s one of the
reasons that most unknown numbers called. In contrary, telemarketing is not the problem in Spain, Mexico and Brazil. In these three countries, most numbers were reported to be a cost trop. This shows that a lot of callers aimed to steal the users’ money in various ways. In the UK alone, most of the phone numbers were reported as harassment calls with the total percentage of 29%. Following harassment calls is the caller type “telemarketer” with a percentage of 22% of the existing phone numbers. Debt collection company also shows a high percentage with 15%
of the whole UK chart. Further information about the study can be found at https://blog.tellows.co.uk/2019/02/tellowsstudy-ii-harassment-calls-take-over-in-the-uk/