South Africans are facing increasingly sophisticated scams, with criminals using caller ID spoofing and artificial intelligence to impersonate banks and other trusted institutions.
Truecaller identified 17.47 billion spam calls globally between January and June 2026, up 25.2% from the same period last year. Users blocked 7.18 billion of the calls.
Spam messages also rose by 58.9% to 3.71 billion, while 559 million new spam numbers were detected between March and June.
Truecaller said scammers are increasingly using spoofed local numbers and AI-generated scripts to sound more convincing.
Despite the surge, fewer South Africans answered identified spam calls, with the rate dropping from 10.2% to 7.8%.
Truecaller urged users to report suspicious numbers to help strengthen its spam detection systems.
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