A phone call used to guarantee a real person on the other end of the line. In Nigeria, that is no longer a safe assumption. New data reveals the country has become the most spammed nation in Africa, with more than half of all unknown calls identified as spam or fraud.
According to figures released by Truecaller, the global platform for verifying contacts and blocking unwanted communication, 51 per cent of unknown calls received by Nigerians in 2025 were spam. This places the country eighth in the world and firmly at the top of the African league table, sitting well ahead of South Africa (30 per cent), Kenya (around 15 per cent), Ghana (around 11 per cent), and Ethiopia (around 9 per cent). Truecaller currently boasts more than 500 million users worldwide.
What sets Nigeria’s situation apart is not just the sheer volume of calls, but who is actually making them. In markets like Indonesia and Mexico, financial services impersonation is the primary lure, driving more than 40 per cent of spam calls. In Chile, automated debt collection accounts for 38 per cent.
In Nigeria, however, the dominant category is telecom and operator-linked outreach. This accounts for 35 per cent of all spam—the highest single-category concentration of any African market in the report. Sales and telemarketing follow at 10 per cent, with direct scams at 6 per cent. Nigeria shares this unusual profile only with Brazil, the only other major market where operator-linked calls dominate the spam landscape.
For the average Nigerian, the implications are stark. When automated carrier messages and unverified third-party agents flood a user's SIM card, the line between a legitimate network update, a promotional push, and outright fraud begins to collapse. It becomes increasingly difficult to tell if an unknown caller is genuinely confirming a data plan, attempting to sell a loan, or a scammer simply wearing a familiar operator’s face.
The broader cost of this saturation is rarely a single, catastrophic fraudulent transfer. Instead, it is a slow, quiet erosion of trust in the phone itself. When experience dictates that most unknown calls are spam, people simply stop answering. Consequently, doctors, schools, dispatch riders, banks, and legitimate businesses are forced to compete for attention on a device that users have been conditioned to ignore. Missed calls quickly translate into missed appointments, delayed information, dropped revenue, and customer relationships that quietly fade away.
‘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,’ said Rishit Jhunjhunwala, CEO of Truecaller. ‘In some countries, most unknown calls are now spam, that 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.’
Nigeria’s struggle is part of a wider global shift towards automated, relentless communication. Indonesia remains the most spammed country in the world, with 79 per cent of unknown calls flagged as spam in 2025. Chile follows at 70 per cent—a stark increase from 51 per cent in just six months. Vietnam, Brazil, and India round out the global top five. By late 2025, the combined Middle East and Africa region had crossed 100 million monthly active users on Truecaller, with Africa representing one of the platform’s fastest-growing communities.
Truecaller crossed the milestone of 500 million monthly active users on 31 March 2026, with more than 150 million of those located outside India. Having identified 68 billion spam and fraud calls in 2025 alone, the Stockholm-headquartered company has been publicly listed on Nasdaq Stockholm since October 2021.
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