Spain has a phone spam problem. Not only do Spaniards receive a high volume of unwanted calls each month, but of those calls, a high percentage are fraud calls, intended to steal money or personal information.
That was one of the findings from Hiya’s latest Global Call Threat Report, which reports data from the first half of 2024. The report reveals spam rates in more than 40 countries worldwide and details the most common scam calls in select countries.
Download the H1 2024 Global Call Threat Report
Residents of Spain receive the second highest volume of spam calls in Europe.
High rate of spam calls
Residents of Spain receive 12 spam calls per month — the second highest volume of spam calls in Europe, second only to France. And spam volumes have only increased. In Q4 of 2023, Spaniards received an average of 10 spam calls per month.
Spain also has the second highest spam rate in Europe — again, second only to France. The spam rate measures the percentage of calls by type. For unknown calls (calls from someone not in an individual’s personal contact list) 39% were identified by Hiya as nuisance and 12% were identified as fraud, for a total spam rate of 51%. That compares to a 29% spam rate in Germany, 28% spam rate in the UK, and 13% rate in Norway.
Spain has the second highest spam rate in Europe.
The most common phone spam in Spain
In the first half of the year, the most commonly reported unwanted call in Spain related to utilities. In Spain, residents can choose their electricity provider, so it’s not uncommon to receive legitimate telemarketing calls from utility companies. However, many users reported these as nuisance or even fraud calls, suspecting they were scammers impersonating a real or fictious utility company.
In Spain, utility and mobile phone sales calls were the most commonly reported type of phone spam in the first half of 2024.
It was a similar story for the second most common unwanted call in Spain. While Spaniards get plenty of legitimate sales calls from mobile phone companies, many users reported that the call they received was a scam trying to collect personal and financial information. Clues included calling at excessively early or late hours, calling multiple times per day, and calling with the same message from several different numbers.
Coming in #3 was a new phone scam that popped up in late February: the TikTok scam. Users report a robocall offering 800 Euros per day for watching and “liking” TikTok videos. Another variation of the TikTok scam claimed the recipient had won a prize, and bank account information was needed in order to deposit the money.
Bank scams, which were the most common scams in Spain in the fourth quarter of 2023, fell to #4 in 2024, and insurance scams fell from #2 to #5.
Get the full report
Hiya's Global Call Threat Report is an invaluable resource for comparing spam rates in countries around the world.
Download 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.
- Spam call comparisons by region.
- Detailed analysis of the US, UK, Canada, Spain, France, Germany and Brazil.
- Top scam calls in each of the seven countries mentioned above.
Methodology
Data in the Global Call Threat Report report is based on a representative sample of calls observed during the first half of 2024 on the Hiya Voice Security Network, which includes Samsung Smart Call enabled devices and the Hiya mobile app.
Spam is defined as unwanted calls, and includes both fraud calls and nuisance calls. The spam flag rate represents calls that Hiya has identified and flagged as either “potential fraud” or “suspected spam.” Spam ratios represent the number of unwanted calls from non-contacts, which are calls placed from numbers that are not in an individual’s local address book.
