South Africa, Dec. 6 -- Spam calls. You'd probably rather receive a lump of coal in your stock this Christmas, but it's an annoyance that affects all phone owners worldwide. In South Africa though, you may experience it more frequently than others.

According to Truecaller's Insights 2019, (which garnered its data anonymously from incoming calls marked as spam or automatically flagged by the company between January 2018 to the end of October 2019) more than 8.6-billion of its 116-billion calls globally were spam.

1.7-million South Africans that used Truecaller on average received 25 of these spam calls per month. It's also a huge jump since Truecaller's 2017 report .

South Africa actually ranks sixth globally for spam call prevalence, b...