It doesn’t take more than a few hours for a brand new phone number to receive its first spam call. The problem is so widespread that India is one of the most spammed countries in the world with Indians receiving, on average, nearly 17 spam calls per user per month, according to a report by Swedish caller ID app Truecaller.

The more sinister side of things are not just telemarketing, but scams, fraud, impersonation and phishing calls. And these will come in by phone call or even SMS. Here are some Truecaller tips on taming the monster.

# Download a caller ID and spam blocking application. As a consumer, choose whichever one you want, though Truecaller has the edge here in terms of accuracy and a high user base in India.

# Never give out any sensitive information over the phone – even if they claim to be from your bank, credit card, cell provider or internet company. If you use Truecaller, look for the green verified badge and ‘verified by Truecaller’ logo – this is an anti-fraud measure.

# SMS is a mostly incoming communication for us and a new SMS scam seems to rear its head every week. Job placements, prizes, KYC expiration, credit card points, long lost relatives – they’re all there. Don’t trust anything you can’t verify. You can copy numbers and search for them in Truecaller to check if other people have marked them as fraudulent.

# Not all spam is dangerous. People mark numbers as spam all the time for various reasons. But you can also view detailed insights into spam marked numbers (detailed statistics on number of calls they make, trends), comments by other users and call reasons, which you see even before you answer the call).

comment COMMENT NOW