Received another spam call or SMS today? That’s not a surprise is it? Truecaller, the world’s most used Caller ID and spam detection app has revealed some enticing stats on spam and scam calls in Malaysia.
Spam calls or unsolicited calls are incredibly annoying, and time-wasting. Malaysia is no different to any other country, and is affected by spam calls on a daily basis.
In fact, according to a Truecaller report entitled Truecaller Insights: Top Spammers in Malaysia in 2017, the average Malaysian Truecaller user receives more than seven spam calls each month.
That’s twice the number compared to our neighbours Singapore (four calls), and Thailand (two calls).
Report methodology
Here’s how Truecaller gathered the spam data on this report. The data was aggregated anonymously from incoming calls that are either marked by users, or flagged by Truecaller, between 14 August to 14 September 2017. This returned a monthly average spam rate. During this period, Malaysia received over 1 million spam calls. To identify the type of spam calls users receive the most, Truecaller referred to the Top 100 spammers in each region for the month of August.
Surprise, surprise, financial services!
Globally, the most common categories in which spam calls come from are, unsurprisingly, finance and insurance alongside telemarketing and debt collection calls. I’m surprised property agents aren’t on the list.
The good news is that Truecaller has helped users identify over 4.3 million spam calls in Malaysia. And that number is for this year alone.
As we drill down to specifics, financial services account foor 67% of spam calls. These are typically banking product offers or cold calls from credit card companies.
Another major annoyance is telemarketing calls, coming in at 13% of total spam calls.
Telemarketing calls can be promotional calls from brands, surveys done by analytics firms, or new client outreach fro services and subscriptions.
Next on the spam list are insurance calls at 9%, and operator calls at 4%. Debt collection, nuisance and scam calls make up 6% of spam calls.
Again, I’m not sure where property agents are on the list, but they form a majority of the spam calls and text (including WhatsApp) that I get on a daily basis.
Spammers, be gone!
In Malaysia, the Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA) empowers consumers to officially write to any company that is using their contact details for marketing, to ask them to stop contact them.
If companies do not comply, they are liable to be fined up to MYR200,000 or jailed for up to two years, or both.
Truecaller makes it easy to look at their Caller ID and know who’s calling, especially if the number isn’t already stored in the phonebook.
The handy app can also block calls as well as SMS, and report spam callers and messages. This also helps the Truecaller community of users to avoid these spammers too.
There are currently more than 250 million Truecaller users globally, on both iOS and Android.
If you aren’t protected by Truecaller already, head over to www.truecaller.com.
