Spam calls were on the rise in South Africa during 2018.

This according to a report from Truecaller, a popular local app that allows users to check the ID of unknown numbers. It’s also quite helpful in identifying phone numbers that spam people, which brings us to their recent report.

It’s the second time that Truecaller released such a report, and compared to 2017, spam calls in most countries are on the rise.

In South Africa in particular it has risen by an estimated 40 percent, Truecaller says, as we rank fourth among all the countries researched.

More specifically they say that the number of spam calls that users receive each month has jumped from 15 in 2018 to 21 in 2018.

Diving deeper into the numbers for South Africa, the Turecaller report notes that 49 percent of the top spam calls were scam related, with people pretending to call from a user’s bank stating that their account has been compromised in some way, and requesting financial details.

Unfortunately Truecaller has no record of how many people in fact offer up such information to scammers, which would make for some interesting reading we’re sure.

Another significant issue when for South Africa is telemarketing, which accounts for 38 percent of all spam calls in the country, with insurance agencies and financial service providers being the biggest offenders.

Whether this trend continues in 2019 for South Africa remains to be seen, but as more people in the country turn to their phones as the primary form of communication, we can’t see the numbers going anywhere except up.

[Image – CC 0 Pixabay]