Data from Truecaller places Nigeria as the most spammed country in Africa. According to the data, more than one in every tow Nigerians in 2025 received 51 percent unknown calls identified as spam or fraud.
Nigeria ranked eight globally and sat at the top of the African league table, ahead of South Africa with 30 percent, Kenya with around 15 percent, Ghana around 11 percent, and Ethiopia around nine percent.
Truecaller, a leading global platform for verifying contacts and blocking unwanted communication, with over 500 million users worldwide, identified says that what makes Nigeria’s story different is who is making the calls.
The platform noted that in Indonesia and Mexico, financial services impersonation is the dominant lure, accounting for over 40 per cent of spam while Chile, automated debt collection drives 38 per cent of all spam.
In Nigeria, the date showed, 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 percent, with scams at six percent.
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.
“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 platform stated.
The firm further explained that the Nigerian numbers sit inside a larger global story. It ranked Indonesia as the most spammed country in the world, with 79 percent of unknown calls flagged as spam in 2025, followed by Chile 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 per cent of unknown calls in some markets, the report said.
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.
