It got better

The Japanese company Rakuten owns one of the most popular messengers in the world, so it can provide such statistics by collecting data on blocking calls from spammers, he writes 24 Channels.

Here are some of those new statistics:

• in 2024 Nearly 90,000 Ukrainians received calls from spammers or scammers on Viber. This is 80% less than in the first 10 months of 2023.
• The total number of users reporting spam or fraud in 2024 was around 4,000. This number is 16 times less than in 2023, when more than 59,000 Ukrainians filed complaints.
• Rakuten Viber blocked 2,500 spammers and scammers in 2024. From January to October 2023, this number was over 37,000; This is 15 times more than this year.

A significant decrease in the number of fraudsters was a result of both the general process of increasing people’s awareness of fraud methods and the introduction of subscriber identification functions. It is clear why Viber discovered the drop in statistics, because the company recently implemented such an option in its messenger, which can connect to regular phone calls not made over the Internet and detect possible fake calls. Thus, the user instantly sees a warning on the screen.

It is worth noting that something similar was developed by Google for the Android operating system. However, the company is introducing new development very slowly; is currently available in test mode on Pixel smartphones. It is not at all clear whether it will work in Ukraine.