A phone call used to mean a person on the other end. In Nigeria, that is no longer a safe assumption, according to a new report by Truecaller, a smartphone application that has features of caller ID, call-blocking, flash-messaging, call-recording, chat and voice by using the Internet.
The company which crossed 500 million global users in April 2026, listed Nigeria as the most spammed country in Africa.
In 2025, 51% of all unknown calls received by Nigerians were identified as spam or fraud, more than one in every two.
Nigeria ranks 8th globally and sits at the top of the African league table, ahead of South Africa (30%), Kenya (around 15%), Ghana (around 11%), and Ethiopia (around 9%).
What makes Nigeria’s story different is who is making the calls. In Indonesia and Mexico, financial services impersonation is the dominant lure, accounting for over 40% of spam. In Chile, automated debt collection drives 38% of all spam.
In Nigeria, the dominant category is Telecom and operator-linked outreach, which accounts for 35% of all spam, the highest single-category concentration of any African market in the report. Sales and telemarketing follow at 10%, with scams at 6%.
The implication for Nigerian users is sharp. 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.
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.
The Nigerian numbers sit inside a larger global story. Indonesia is the most spammed country in the world, with 79% of unknown calls flagged as spam in 2025. Chile follows at 70%, up from 51% 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% 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. 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.
“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, 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,” said Rishit Jhunjhunwala, CEO of Truecaller.
On March 31, 2026, Truecaller crossed 500 million monthly active users, with more than 150 million outside India.
The full Spam and Fraud Report, including the complete top 10 ranking and regional breakdown, is available at the Truecaller Insights page.
