You've Got a Call: 25.8 Million Spam Calls Identified in Indonesia in 2021

TheIndonesia.id - A recent report showed there are at least 25.8 million spam calls made in Indonesia in 2021, increasing by 41 percent from last year’s figure.

Global contact verifier platform Truecaller has recently released their annual report on countries that are most affected by spam calls, and Indonesia ranked sixth with 25.8 million spam calls identified from January to October this year. This number increased significantly from 18.3 million spam calls in 2020.

Financial services dominated these calls with 80 percent, followed by sales (19 percent) and scammers (one percent).

However, despite only making up one percent of total spam calls, the report also revealed that scammers in Indonesia use an “unusually scientific and precise way” of obtaining relevant information of their targets as they are familiar with the practice of “digging out the complete background and financial history”.

Furthermore, Trucall noted that the one percent can also be interpreted as lack of public’s knowledge about scam calls, hence their inability to detect and recognize them.

“[The] data clearly reveals that Indonesians are being targeted with a high number of unwanted communications, exposing millions of smartphone users to the risk of being scammed,” Truecaller CEO and co-founder Alan Mamedi said in a statement. He added that the report is expected to educate and raise awareness among Indonesians about how spam works and how to identify and avoid being a victim of one of those calls.

The rising and worrying number of spam calls also begs the question of what needs to be done about it. A recent threat landscape report published by cyber security agency SOCRadar showed that threats from dark web is increasing in the country, and information on millions of Indonesians have been sold on the rather unsafe part of the internet. Names, phone numbers, date of birth, national identity number, and even monthly salaries have become sought-after commodities.

The fifth edition of the yearly report listed Brazil, Peru, Ukraine, India, and Mexico in the top five countries most affected by spam calls in 2021. The data was taken between January 1 and October 31, and 184.5 billion calls from over 300 million users worldwide were identified.