Nigeria Leads Africa in Spam Calls
Nigeria leads Africa with 51 percent of unknown calls flagged as spam or fraud, reshaping how people communicate daily.
Nigeria is Africa’s most spammed country, as 51 percent of unknown calls to citizens are ranked as fraud. Nigeria is the most spammed country in Africa. In 2025, 51 per cent of all unknown calls received by Nigerians were identified as spam or fraud, more than one in every two.
Nigeria ranked eighth globally and sat at the top of the African league table, ahead of South Africa (30 percent), Kenya (around 15 percent), Ghana (around 11 percent), and Ethiopia (around nine percent).
The data is drawn from Truecaller, the leading global platform for verifying contacts and blocking unwanted communication, with over 500 million users worldwide.
What makes Nigeria’s story different is who is making the calls. Truecaller noted that in Indonesia and Mexico, financial services impersonation is the dominant lure, accounting for over 40 percent of spam.
In Chile, automated debt collection drives 38 percent of all spam. In Nigeria, the dominant category is telecom and operator-linked outreach, which accounts for 35 percent of all spam, the highest single-category concentration of any African market in the report. Sales and telemarketing follow at 10 per cent, with scams at six per cent.
The implication for Nigerian users is sharp. Truecaller explained that when automated outreach from carriers and unverified third-party agents dominates the calls landing on a Nigerian SIM, the lines between a legitimate service update, a promotional push, and outright fraud begin to collapse.
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“A user can no longer reliably tell whether an unknown call is the network confirming a data plan, a third party selling a loan, or a scammer wearing a familiar operator’s face. The same pattern shows up in Brazil, the only other major market where operator-linked calls dominate the spam landscape,” it stated.
The firm explained that the Nigerian numbers sit inside a larger global story. Indonesia is the most spammed country in the world, with 79 percent of unknown calls flagged as spam in 2025. Chile follows at 70 percent, up from 51 percent in just six months. Vietnam, Brazil, and India round out the global top five. Across South America and Southeast Asia, automated systems now drive more than 70 percent of unknown calls in some markets.
In late 2025, the combined Middle East and Africa region crossed 100 million monthly active users on Truecaller, with Africa representing one of the platform’s fastest-growing communities.
The cost of this saturation is rarely a single fraudulent transfer. It is a slow erosion of trust in the phone itself.
Truecaller noted that when most unknown calls are spam, people stop answering. Doctors, schools, dispatch riders, banks, and legitimate Nigerian businesses then compete for attention on a device that experience has trained users to ignore. Missed calls become missed appointments, delayed information, dropped revenue, and customer relationships that quietly fade away.
CEO of Truecaller, Rishit Jhunjhunwala, said: “The scale of what this data shows should concern everyone. Fraud, impersonation, and scams are affecting people’s daily lives in a way we have never seen before. In some countries, most unknown calls are now spam, which is a fundamental breakdown in how communication works. Our mission is to build trust in communication, and in 2026, we are focused on stopping fraud before it reaches people.”
On March 31, 2026, Truecaller crossed 500 million monthly active users, with more than 150 million outside India.
