‘7in10 people in India hit by tech support scams’
NEW DELHI: India witnessed a relatively high rate of tech support scams at 69% in the last 12 months—among the highest globally—with a significant increase seen in such scams stemming from unsolicited calls, a Microsoft survey said on Thursday.
Microsoft’s 2021 Global Tech Support Scam Research report showed that consumers in India experienced a relatively high “scam encounter rate” of 69% in the last 12 months, similar to the 70% rate experienced in 2018. However, there was an overall five-point drop in such scam encounters globally with a rate of 59% over the same period.
Microsoft commissioned YouGov for this global survey in 16 countries, including India, Australia,
Japan and Singapore and it included 16,254 adult internet users (about 1,000 per country). This is a follow-up to similar surveys that Microsoft fielded in 2018 and 2016.
About 48% of the respondents in India were tricked into continuing with the scam—an eightpoint increase from 2018, and three times higher than the
global average (16%). One in three (31%) of those surveyed continued engaging and eventually lost money, an increase of 17 points compared with 2018 (14%), the report said.
Consumers in India who lost money to such scams in 2021 lost ₹15,334 on average. However, 88% of those who lost any money were able to recover some back, with the average being ₹10,797. The most common methods of payment for those who lost any money were through bank transfers (43%), followed by gift cards (38%), PayPal (32%), credit cards (32%), and Bitcoin (25%).
Microsoft said the high number of people falling victim to scams is likely due to consumers in India being more trusting of unsolicited contact and more inclined to believe that a company would initiate contact. Of those surveyed in 2021, 47% said they thought that it was very or somewhat likely that a company would contact them via an unsolicited call, pop-up, text message, ad or email. Interestingly, incidences of unsolicited call scams increased from 23 %to 31% in India between 2018 to 2021, and this continues to be the scam type that consumers in India respond to most often.