83% of Russians Receive at Least One Spam Call a Week

In a survey conducted by Yandex, they found that at least 83% of Russians receive a spam telephone call once a week.

The survey focused on Russians aged 18 to 55 in cities with a population of more than 100 thousand people.

Key highlights from the data include:

  • 48% of respondents said that they receive spam calls often or very often (in 2019, there were 33%).
  • 83% of respondents have encountered unwanted calls in the last week (in 2019 there were 64%).

Survey participants who encountered unwanted calls were asked to rate the degree of their irritation from this on a scale from 1 to 5. The survey showed that the level of irritation of Russians due to spam calls is growing – in 2020 they are already pissed off by 61% of respondents ( so many respondents rated 5 out of 5). In 2019, there were 55% of them.

Most often, respondents are faced with calls with advertisements of financial organizations, as well as calls from robots and autoinformants (69% each), about half of the respondents received calls from scammers (54%) and sellers of health services (47%). Also, Russians often receive calls offering communication services (46%).

How Russians Tackle Unwanted Calls

  • 44% – block / blacklist the caller’s phone number.
  • 41% – do not accept any calls from unknown numbers.
  • 25% – check an unknown number on the Internet.
  • 22% – accept the call and let the interlocutor understand that they no longer want to receive calls from him (for example, they shout or ask to remove the number from the database).
  • 16% use caller ID applications.
  • 7% – subscribed to the service of automatic rejection and blocking of unwanted numbers from a mobile operator.
  • 5% – subscribed to the service of determining the number of a mobile operator.

Only 12% of those surveyed do not use any methods to combat unwanted calls. When answering a question, you could choose several answer options, so the sum of all options exceeds 100%.