Telecom Operators account for 61% of spam calls in Nigeria – Truecaller

According to Truecaller, a company known for providing caller ID, spam detection, messaging services, Telecom Operators account for 61% of spam calls in Nigeria. Operator spam calls involve telecom companies cold calling people. During these type of calls, call centre agents attempt to upsell data plans or push promotional offers to the public at large. The Telecom operators in Nigeria are MTN, Airtel, Globacom and Etisalat.

This was revealed in a report “Truecaller Insights: Top 20 Countries Affected by Spam Calls in 2017” made available recently by the company.

Another major spam call problem that Nigerians have to deal with (27%) is nuisance calls. These kinds of spam calls in general are unwanted and unsolicited calls that are a disturbance for users, or at the very least amount to prank calls and at worst, harassment.

Rounding off the spam call list in Nigeria are telemarketing calls at 2%, which are promotional calls from companies, surveys being done by analytics firms on behalf of their clients, political/robo calls, or new client outreach for services and subscriptions.

The report also states that annoying and unwanted spam calls are on the rise around the globe with the average Truecaller user receiving more than 20 spam calls each month within large markets such as India, the US, and Brazil.

Here is a list of the top 20 countries affected by spam calls in 2017.

A closer look at the other African countries – South Africa, Egypt and Kenya in the “Top 20 list” reveal the following:

Spam calls in South Africa

Spam calls are big business in South Africa, as the direct marketing industry reported employing more than 150 000 workers, with the average call centre agent logging around 1 600 calls on a monthly basis. This amounts to South Africans being collectively bombarded by tens of thousands of spam calls each and every day. In fact, Truecaller app users already identify over 8.5-million local spam calls on a monthly basis.

According to the company’s Top 20 Countries Affected by Spam Calls in 2017 report, South Africa seems to have more of an even spread when it comes to who is spamming. With telemarketing (39%) leading the way, while financial services (24%) and insurance (13%) are the most known types of spam calls.

Unlike Kenya and Nigeria, South Africa only has 1% of its local calls marked as scam calls.

Spam calls in Kenya

Kenya was a different case when compared to the other Top 20 countries listed in this research. Scam calls made up a whopping 91% of the reported spam calls. Scam calls are basically fraud attempts via your telephone, with scammers using a phoney scheme to swindle money from unsuspecting members of the public.

The rest of the listed spam calls were constituted by financial services such as banking product offers, unsolicited credit union calls or credit card companies cold dialling people.

Spam calls in Egypt

Egypt’s spam behavior is very similar to Kenya – where you can see a lot of scam calls going on. Judging by this graph, Egypt is the country that is receiving the most scam calls.

Ways to counter spammers

In 2016, the Nigerian regulatory body Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) forced the telecom operators to dedicate the short-code 2442 on their networks for use by subscribers to opt-in to the “Do Not Disturb” database restricting unsolicited marketing messages (Voice and SMS on their MSISDNs”, including the use of web-based solutions as opt-out measures. However in an activity summary of the Nigeria Communications Commission, the regulatory body decried this lack of awareness on the part of the telcos.

“Whereas, the Commission’s compliance checks revealed that most Mobile Network Operators have set up the Do Not Disturb facility on their networks, however, the awareness of existence of this facility is very low because the MNOs are reluctant to sensitize their subscribers on the availability of this facility and how to opt into same. Further investigations suggest that operators were not actually keen on the DND as this may affect their revenue stream from value added services.”

In South Africa, the Direct Marketing Association of South Africa, enables people to add themselves onto a list of non-contactable contacts, at least by members of this association. This list of no-go contacts is referred to as the National Opt-out Database.

In addition, more than 250-million people around the world are using apps such as Truecaller to see caller IDs and know who’s calling, even if the number is not stored in their phonebook. This app also enables users to block calls as well as SMSs and report spam callers and messages, allowing the larger community of users to avoid the spammers too.

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Note:

The data in this article was aggregated anonymously from incoming calls that either has been marked as spam by users – or automatically been flagged by Truecaller during the period of January 1st, 2017 to May 31st, 2017 to understand the monthly average spam rate. During this period of time, our users received over 5.5 billion spam calls.

As for what type of spam calls users are receiving the most Truecaller looked at the top 100 spammers in each region for the month of May.

Category Key:

• Nuisance: Due to this being a broad spectrum of calls, it is generally calls that is unwanted, disturbance for users, harassment, pranks.
• Telemarketing: Promotional calls from companies, surveys, political/robo calls, new client outreach for services, subscriptions, etc.
• Operator: Telecom companies upselling data plans, promotions, etc.
• Financial service: Banks, credit unions, credit card companies etc.
• Scam: Fraud attempts, money swindling, unknown links, etc.
• Insurance: Companies that specialize in selling different types of insurances.
• Debt collection: Organizations that specialize in payments of debts owed by individuals or businesses, bounty hunters.
• Political: Campaign calls to secure votes for parties, robocalls.
• Health: Hospitals, private practices.