South Africa among most spammed countries in the world, Truecaller report
South Africa continues to be one of the most spammed countries in the world – where it jumps from 5th position to the 4th most spam affected country. This is according to the latest findings from Truecaller Insights report
The insights show that South Africa has seen a 40% increase of spam calls in the country going from 15 to 21 spam calls/month. The report which looks at the top 20 countries affected by spam calls in 2018.
The insights study have revealed that the 5.3 million Truecaller app users receive a total of 21 spam calls monthly. This puts South Africa as the fourth most-spammed country, a staggering 71.4% increase in spam compared to findings from last year.
Almost half (49%) of all top spam calls in South Africa is scam related e.g. tech support fraud, where someone pretends to call from your bank or a company saying that your account has been hijacked and need your help to take control of it; one ring scam, an unknown number (usually an international number) gives you a missed call and when you call them back you get charged a hefty fee for calling to that number; job offer scam, someone pretends to be a headhunter calling you to offer you a job but you need to pay a fee in order to get the job.
Compared to last year’s data, fewer African markets are now sitting in the Top 20 list: Kenya, Morocco, Egypt, and Nigeria. South Africa is the only country that has topped the list again with an increase in overall spam related calls.
‘’South Africa is the only country in the list – as a matter of fact, the amount of spam calls has increased from 15 to 21 spam calls/months – that is a 40% increase!’’ the report said.
Telemarketing is also a big problem in South Africa, which accounts for 38% of all top spam calls in the country. These type of calls usually come from various companies, insurance agencies and financial services trying to offer something.
In 2018 alone, Truecaller says it helped our users block and identify 17.7 billion spam calls – and also helped identify 74.1 billion calls in general for its users. This means that close to every fourth call that Truecaller users receive are spam calls.
Digging deeper into the bigger markets, Truecaller says it found common categories that tie all these spam calls together. ‘’The biggest pattern we could see was that operators across the world are the biggest spammers. We could also see that telemarketing calls from financial services, debt collectors and insurance related matters are spamming our users globally.’’
