Spam callers had a good six months in South Africa. Truecaller, the app that names the number calling you, put 17.47 billion spam calls on South African phones between January and June, 25.2% more than the same stretch last year. That comes to almost 270 calls each.
That figure is an estimate rather than a tally. Truecaller does not sit on the networks counting traffic. Instead, it measures what its own South African users receive and scales it up to the whole population, which makes 17.47 billion a well-informed projection, not a headcount.
Spoofing, AI, and a bank that isn't your bank
Two things are doing the work, says Mmathebe Zvobwo, Truecaller's director of market development in South Africa. The first is caller ID spoofing, where the caller fakes the number that shows on your screen. The second is generative AI, which makes the conversation that follows sound like a real person. Together, she says, they "industrialise deception at scale". A lot of it arrives dressed as your bank's fraud department, which is the one call you have been trained to take seriously.
"Scam networks are not slowing down," Zvobwo said. "If anything, they are becoming more sophisticated, using spoofing and AI-driven tactics to appear legitimate."
Take a look at the supply and it just keeps refreshing. Truecaller's users flagged 559 million new spam numbers between March and June alone, and the texts are growing faster than the calls, at 3.71 billion for the half. The one thing that improved, though, was us. The share of flagged spam calls that South Africans actually answered fell from 10.2% last year to 7.8%.
The register that has not started
In April the Department of Trade, Industry and Competition published direct marketing rules under the Consumer Protection Act. Every direct marketer must register with the National Consumer Commission, check its opt-out list monthly, and leave alone anyone who is on it. Registration costs R2,574 to start and R1,930.50 a year after that. Marketers who don't register may not call at all, and ignoring the list carries a penalty of up to R1 million or a tenth of annual turnover, whichever is bigger.
South Africa has had an opt-out list for years, run by the industry's own association, and signing up to it was optional. This one is not. The Commission has opened applications, both for marketers and for consumers who want off the phone. Spokesperson Phetho Ntaba told News24 the regulator is tying up loose ends and the system will launch very soon. In other words, four months after the rules were published, no launch date has been announced.
