The first quarter of 2025 was a busy time for scammers. Unwanted phone calls — both illegal fraud calls and annoying nuisance calls — rose from 11.3 billion in Q4 2024 to 12.5 billion in Q1 2025.
In Q1, there was a noticeable change in the phone spam makeup compared to Q4 of 2024. As the new year began, holiday related scams such as Amazon and package delivery scams began to recede. In fact, Amazon scams dropped from their #1 spot in Canada for the first time in years.
Q1 brings with it colder temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere, so we saw an increase in energy and electricity-provider scams in North America and Europe. Fraudsters devised a variety of schemes to snare consumers desperately trying to save money on their winter heating and electricity bills.
Those were just some of the findings in the just-published Global Call Threat Report, which includes data from Q1 2025. Read the report to discover:
- Number of spam calls per person per month in 40+ countries.
- Percentage of calls that are suspected to be fraud vs. nuisance.
- Top phone scams in US, UK, Canada, Spain, France, Germany and Brazil.
- Spam call comparisons by region.
Download the Q1 2025 Global Call Threat Report
Emerging scams and long-time
In Q1 we saw the emergence of a new scam that’s growing in several countries. It’s an employment scam that begins with a robocall from a supposed human resources agent with a job offer. The HR rep asks to connect on WhatsApp for more details about the job, allowing the scam to continue in the private messaging app. This scam was #1 in Spain, #3 in the UK, and #4 in France.
That’s not to say that most scams in Q1 were brand new. In the US, Medicare scams remained the #1 scam in the country, and in the UK, HMRC tax scams continued to be the top scam. In Germany, sweepstakes scams were still #1, and in Brazil nearly all the top fraud calls impersonate banks or financial institutions.
1 in 4 calls contain AI-generated audio
The Global Call Threat report also includes, for the first time ever, results of Hiya’s analysis of AI-generated calls.
Using recorded calls from the Hiya honeypot (thousands of Hiya-owned phone numbers), Hiya’s AI Voice Detection team found that 1 in 4 contained AI-generated audio. And the content of those AI calls were much more likely to be malicious, with 55% of them identified as fraud.
Get the full report
The Global Call Threat Report is a valuable resource for phone carriers, businesses and individuals. Use the report to compare phone spam in your own country with other countries in your region and other countries around the world.
To learn more, download the Global Call Threat Report.
