Telcos are Nigeria’s top spammers, says Truecaller

Truecaller, an application that helps GSM users identify callers that are not in their phone book, has said telecommunications operators are to blame for the bulk of spam calls in Nigeria.

Spam calls are unsolicited calls received on mobile phones and these are largely advertorial messages.

In a recent ranking carried out by the company, Nigeria was ranked 9th out of the top 20 countries affected by spam calls in the world.

India, USA, Brazil, Chile and South Africa were the top five countries.

“Similar to its regional partner, Kenya, the country of Nigeria also has an issue with scam calls (27 percent), but is plagued more by calls from operators,” the company wrote in a statement.

According to the research, 61 percent of the total spam calls were from telecoms operators. During these calls, call centre agents would often seek to inform customers of promotional offers.

27 percent were said to be nuisance calls, 10 percent were scam calls while two percent were telemarketing calls, which are promotion calls from companies, and surveys being done by analytics firms on behalf of their clients.

In the first week of May 2016, the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) mandated telecommunication companies to activate a Do Not Disturb code, giving June 30 of the same year as the deadline for implementation.

The code gave subscribers the option to opt-in or opt-out of unsolicited text messages and calls.