JAKARTA, INDONESIA — Data privacy and security is a rising concern in Indonesia. As part of Truecaller’s commitment to offering safe and secured communication by helping users prevent spam and fraud calls, the brand has initiated the #KnowYourCaller campaign. This campaign aims to spread the word about phone/online scams and help consumers in Indonesia engage in safe and efficient communications.
Truecaller has created a fun video campaign, specifically for Indonesia, with the theme ‘Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing. The cast is three famous faces: Yayan Ruhian, Dinda Kanya Dewi, and Billy Boedjanger. Each of them played the role of a deceitful wolf camouflaged as an innocent sheep. With such a fantastic cast, they all played their parts with ease.
“Indonesia is a priority market for Truecaller. Our own Insights research places Indonesia as one of the most spammed countries in the world. We’re on a mission to make communication safer for everyone so we want to minimise these ongoing phone spam and scams. The idea behind this campaign is to alert people about the menace so that they do not fall prey to it. Truecaller is the critical difference between a trusted caller and a caller who intends to harm you, financially, emotionally or physically,” said Hitesh Raj Bhagat, Global Head of Corporate Communications at Truecaller.
Talking about the latest campaign, Anish Daryani, Founder and President Director, M&C Saatchi Indonesia, said “Truecaller is a strong purpose-driven brand, centred around making communications safe for people the world over. The menace of spam calls is prevalent in Indonesia, with little regulation to keep it under check. This is where Truecaller is going to play a strong role in people’s lives by giving them an option to stay protected against spam and scam calls and messages. At M&C Saatchi, we focus on creating work that leads to positive change in society, and the #KnowYourCaller campaign does just that. The app is something I use personally – it is designed with user safety and security in mind.”
Truecaller also caught up with Indonesian actor and martial artist, Yayan Ruhian, star of the first film in the campaign and many notable box office hits such as The Raid, The Raid 2, and Star Wars: The Force Awakens. “Truecaller is my third TVC. I’m interested because the product and concept are very different from before. Seeing the storyboard that was sent to us a few days before shooting, frankly I’m getting more and more interested because I feel this is a challenge, and in terms of scale of production, I’m sure it will be done very well. I am personally satisfied with the result. After it was released, I received a lot of responses and almost all of them were positive, not only from the Indonesian public but also from outside.”
Yayan further added, “I am very wary of receiving calls from numbers that are not saved in my contacts. In the past, I mostly ignored it. In fact, not a few who turned out to be an important call from family, relations, and friends. Since installing Truecaller, it has helped me a lot in filtering incoming calls to my cell phone.
Based on the Truecaller Insights 2020 Report, the average number of spam calls in Indonesia is 18.3 calls per user, per month. The report also states that Indonesia deals with the highest number of spam calls in the Asia region and is ranked 6th in the world.
Based on Indonesian National Police data from 2019, the most common type of cyber crime was fraud. Some of the channels used by fraudsters were email, websites, social media, and telephones. The total losses caused by email fraud in 2019 were reported to be more than Rp144 billion. Meanwhile, total losses of fraud via e-commerce websites reached more than Rp73 billion.
Truecaller has the capability and expertise to scale and meet user demands, especially in the digital environment, where online fraud transactions are estimated to generate losses of up to $30 billion annually in the US alone. Last year Truecaller successfully blocked and identified 31.3 billion spam calls and 12.8 billion spam SMS globally.
“Truecaller’s mission is to build trust in communication. As the leading global platform for verifying contacts and blocking unwanted communication, we are proud to officially launch the company’s new campaign #KnowYourCaller. We hope people enjoy the theme but more importantly, we hope it can spread the importance of safety in our daily communication.” added Hitesh.
AppAnnie has ranked Truecaller as the top communication app in India, and it is among the top three in Egypt and Israel. The app is among the top 10 apps in 20 other countries, including Indonesia, Malaysia, Nigeria, India, and South Africa.
Study Case – Scam Call in Indonesia Part 1
Anisa, a private employee who lives in Jakarta, became a victim of fraud via a credit card-mode cell phone. The incident that occurred in January 2021 began when she received a call from an unknown phone number claiming to be an officer from a well-known bank and asked her to verify the data and provide the OTP number. As a result of this incident, she suffered a loss of IDR 21,000,000.
Despite making various efforts to minimize the impact of losses, starting from blocking, making complaints to the police station and also contacting several e-commerce sites to cancel a number of transactions made by the scammers using her credit card. However, these efforts did not produce many results as expected.
Study Case – Scam Call in Indonesia Part 2
Represent her mother, Gita, a private employee domiciled in Jakarta, said that several years ago her mother experienced a scam through the cellphone. The caller who claimed to be an employee of a well-known bank informed that Gita’s mother had won the prize from the bank and asked her to transfer some money to redeem the prize. This incident made Gita’s mother lose 20 million rupiah.
Not much was done by the Gita family after the mother experienced the scam. They just contacted the bank and asked for an explanation if it’s possible to refund the money lost due to the scam experienced by his mother. But unfortunately, the bank could not help because the transfer transaction was carried out directly by the account owner, Gita’s mother.
