South African phones were targeted by 17.47 billion spam calls between January and June, according to the caller identification app Truecaller. That is 25.2% more than the 13.96 billion recorded over the same six months in 2025. Truecaller users blocked 7.18 billion of them, a 58.6% rise year on year. News24 divided the total by Statistics SA's mid-year population estimate of 63.1 million people and arrived at almost 270 unwanted calls per person.
Treat the headline number as an estimate rather than a count. Truecaller reaches it by analysing the volume of spam calls its own South African members receive and drawing a statistical inference for the whole population, not by measuring traffic at the networks.
What is driving the volumes
Mmathebe Zvobwo, Truecaller's director of market development in South Africa, points at caller ID spoofing, where a caller deceptively alters how their number appears on the receiver's phone to disguise their identity, and at generative AI. The two, she says, are being used to industrialise deception at scale. Scam networks are not slowing down, Zvobwo said, and if anything they are becoming more sophisticated, using spoofing and AI-driven tactics to appear legitimate. Common variants include callers impersonating bank fraud departments. Truecaller's community reporting network detected 559 million new spam numbers between March and June alone, and spam text messages ran to 3.71 billion for the half-year, up 58.9%.
One thing has improved. The share of identified spam calls that South Africans actually answered fell from 10.2% in the first half of 2025 to 7.8% in the same period this year. When a call is flagged before it rings through, Zvobwo said, people are choosing not to engage.
The register that has not started
In April the Department of Trade, Industry and Competition published direct marketing regulations under the Consumer Protection Act. They require every direct marketer to register with the National Consumer Commission, cleanse their databases monthly against the Commission's opt-out registry, and stop contacting anyone who has opted out. An unregistered marketer is prohibited from contacting consumers for marketing purposes at all. Registration costs R2,574 up front and R1,930.50 a year to renew. Marketers that fail to comply face administrative penalties of up to R1 million or 10% of annual turnover, whichever is greater.
South Africa already has an opt-out register run by the Direct Marketing Association of South Africa, but it is voluntary; the new rules make the Commission's version a legal requirement. Commission spokesperson Phetho Ntaba told News24 that applications are open for both marketers and consumers, that the regulator is still tying up loose ends, and that the system will launch very soon. No date has been given.
