How to Protect Your Personal Number from Endless Spam?
Have you been looking at the various spam calls and messages on your phone and just shaking your head at the routinely annoying occurrence that is spam? If yes, you are not alone in disregarding the serious repercussions that spam may have on your personal and confidential data. Since we are now so used to the presence of spam, we tend to forget that spam is, in actuality, an intrusion into our privacy and personal data. Indeed, your personal number is the code to access a horde of data specific to you – including your age, location, net worth, shopping behaviour, preferred brands, employment status, etc. Today, our personal numbers are connected with everything from our bank accounts and investment details to our Aadhar and PAN numbers. And, it stands to reason that spammers can easily access your data once they have your personal number at hand.
How does this happen? How do companies and people you have never heard about or known find your number and start creating a presence in your call log or message box? Well, the entire menace can be traced back to an instance where you may have, unwittingly, entered your personal number in an online app or shared it with the salesperson at the retail store you frequently visit. Really, before spam became a menace, how many of us hesitated before sharing our numbers with whoever cared to ask? Even today, many of us give away our personal numbers without a second thought because it has become a habit. And this habit is costing us heavily as it makes us easy targets for spammers, fraudsters and other miscreants.
Indeed, while you consented to sharing your number in the first place, that is the only step where consent would be required. Once your number changes hands, you will not be privy to the fact that the company or person sourcing your number is sharing it with anyone and everyone willing to pay the price, so much so that your personal number, and the details linked to it, could easily fall into the hands of telemarketers or even criminal outfits looking to target lay people. The danger is extremely real. Just yesterday, Shruti received a call from a fraudster pretending to be an employee at ICICI Bank, and she unknowingly agreed to a KYC process which ended up in a fraudulent transaction worth 25,000 rupees. Thankfully, the bank took quick steps to address the issue and Shruti managed to recover her savings but this is just one instance of how serious spam and caller fraud can be.
This leads us to the next question – how then can we actually protect our personal number from spam? One of the easiest and most effective means to protecting your personal number is to get a Doosra virtual sim card in India. This virtual phone number in India can ensure that you never have to share your personal number with applications or retail stores. Your second mobile number from Doosra will act as a shield between spammers and your personal number. Further, the Doosra virtual second phone number can also protect you from spam calls as the service ensures that you only receive calls from people you actually know.
According to news reports, Truecaller said, in the ‘Global Spam Report 2021’, that India now ranks fourth among countries most affected by spam, up five positions. We can therefore estimate just how serious the threat actually is. With a Doosra virtual sim card, protect your personal number from spammers, effectively and easily.
