Introduction
Since 2009, Truecaller has been a global combatant against spam and fraud, tirelessly working to safeguard communication for all. Undoubtedly, the pervasive ubiquity of spam and scam calls and texts have personally touched you or someone you know through various scams, from warranty fraud to identity theft. This is our effort to create a monthly data scorecard.
Our mission is not only to illuminate the immense scale of this problem but also to empower consumers with the knowledge to protect themselves. While exploring diverse fraud drivers across different regions, we are localising and isolating spam and scam volumes and trends.
Our analysis is based on anonymized, aggregated insights and ‘privacy by design - strictly maintaining user privacy and focusing solely on scam activities without storing any personally identifiable information (PII). Please come back to this page on the fifth of every month to see updated statistics for the previous month.
Knowledge is Power!
Key Highlights
On average, we see around 8 spam calls per user per month.
The number of spam and unwanted calls received by Americans averages out to 2.9 Billion calls every month.
According to our internal metrics, Americans wasted an estimated 255 Million hours, (which collectively equates to 10.6 Million days or 349,000 months) on answering spam calls in the last 12 months alone, in the period between Oct 1, 2023 to Sept 30, 2024.
Volume of spam calls & messages
Spam stats for the previous month
2,144,875,718
445,713,550
Spam Calls & Messages per state
Most unwanted calls
Per our analytics, the top 10 states that receive the most amount of unwanted calls on average per user per month are:
Least unwanted calls
The states that receive the lowest amount of spam calls per user per month are:
Navigate the map to see how much spam each state receives
Top Callers Originating from U.S. and Abroad
Between regular sales calls, robocalls from legitimate businesses, online surveys, political or donation calls and outright scams - scam calls with malicious intent make up the majority of all unwanted communication. Among these, thanks to user markings, we observed that the majority of scams were related to credit card fraud, identity theft, medicare/insurance, social security, car warranty and debt collection.
On average, a spam call received by Americans lasts about 4 minutes. This means that the recipients are not able to accurately recognise unwanted communication, giving spammers or scammers enough time to trap their victims.
While a majority of spam calls (90.17%) made to Americans originate or seem to originate from within the US, for the 9.83% of calls that originate outside the US, it is typically from the following countries.
| Country | % Spam - Outside US |
|---|---|
| 1India | 78.69% |
| 2South Africa | 3.28% |
| 3Nigeria | 2.2% |
| 4Colombia | 2.06% |
| 5Mexico | 2.06% |
| 6Chile | 1.31% |
| 7Rest of the World | 10.41% |
| Breakdown in percent |
|---|
Methodology
Previous versions of the Truecaller US Spam & Scam report have relied on surveys conducted in partnership with The Harris Poll. You will find these previous annual reports in the Insights section on the Truecaller official blog. All spam and scam statistics and information presented here are based on big data: large scale anonymized data sets specific to Truecaller users residing in the United States. The numbers are projected against U.S. Govt census data. This includes only the adult US population with data connected smartphones who have installed Truecaller.