JAKARTA (THE JAKARTA POST/ASIA NEWS NETWORK) - Indonesia has been named the third-most spammed country in the world by Swedish-based smartphone application Truecaller, a significant jump from last year's 16th position.
In South-east Asia, Indonesia was the most spammed market.
According to the latest Truecaller Insights Report published on Dec 3, Indonesian users currently receive up to 27.9 spam calls per month, with financial services (40 per cent) and insurance brokers (23 per cent) identified as the country's top spammers.
The data was compiled from incoming calls between Jan 1 and Oct 30 that either were marked as spam by users or automatically flagged as such by Truecaller, which in total has globally identified 116 billion unknown calls, 26 billion spam calls and 8.6 billion spam SMS messages.
"The most alarming trend is that scam calls have more than doubled in the past year - going from 10 per cent to 21 per cent," read the report, adding that it had received feedback from users that scammers had taken the country's recent unrest as an opportunity to scam people.
Among the popular scams are said to be the "one ring scam or Wangiri scam", as well as a fake hospital/injury call where someone calls to report that a family member or friend has been hospitalised and a request to send money for treatment.
The two countries that were more spammed than Indonesia this year were Brazil and Peru.
Aside from spam calls, Indonesia was also ranked 10th in the report's top-20 countries affected by spam SMS messages in 2019, which saw Ethiopia, South Africa and Kenya sitting in the top three.
On average, Indonesian users receive up to 46 spam SMS messages every month.
"Our data shows that the top countries to receive the most spam SMS messages are in emerging markets. The top three markets that are affected are in the African continent. Ethiopians receive the most spam SMS messages in the world, with an average of 119 spam SMS messages on a monthly basis," read the report.
In total, Truecaller is said to have helped identify 8.6 billion spam SMS messages globally.
