The telephone once carried a simple promise. When it rang, somebody wanted to speak to you.

That promise has been broken.

South Africans now approach an unknown call as a possible intrusion, sales pitch or attempted theft. We let it ring, search the number online and wait to see whether the caller leaves a message. The phone still works technically. Socially, its credibility is collapsing.

Truecaller estimates that South African phones received 17.47 billion spam calls during the first six months of 2026, an increase of 25.2% from the corresponding period last year. Divided across the population, that amounts to almost 270 calls per person.

The figure needs a caveat. It is not a direct count drawn from every telecommunications network. Truecaller analyses calls reaching its South African users and extrapolates an estimate for the broader population. It is therefore more accurate to treat 17.47 billion as an indicator of scale than as a precise national census of every unwanted ring.

Even with that qualification, something is badly wrong.

Only 7.8% of identified spam calls were answered during the first half of the year, down from 10.2% a year earlier. People are learning to distrust the call before hearing the caller.

Not every unwanted call is criminal. Many are legitimate businesses trying to sell insurance, credit, cellphone contracts, funeral cover or financial services. But lawful business does not become harmless merely because it is not fraud. Persistent unsolicited marketing consumes time, invades privacy and destroys trust in the communications system.

Criminals then enter the distrust created by marketers. They impersonate bank fraud departments, disguise their numbers and use personal information to sound credible. The victim sees a familiar-looking cellphone number and hears someone who knows their name, bank or recent transaction. Urgency does the rest.

The scammer benefits from an ecosystem built by ordinary marketing.

Personal information enters this system through many doors. Consumers supply telephone numbers when opening accounts, requesting quotations, entering competitions or downloading services. Consent is sometimes buried in terms and conditions few people read. Numbers also circulate through lead-generation companies, old databases, information brokers and security breaches.

Once the information is loose, accountability becomes difficult. The person making the call may work for an outsourced call centre several companies removed from the business whose product is being sold. Asking where the number came from frequently produces evasion or a dead line.

South Africa has laws against this behaviour. POPIA generally requires consent for unsolicited electronic direct marketing, with a limited exception for existing customers receiving offers for similar products. Consumers must be able to opt out freely.

Amendments to the Consumer Protection Act regulations introduced in April 2026 go further. Direct marketers must register with the National Consumer Commission, check their databases monthly against a national opt-out registry and stop contacting consumers who have registered a pre-emptive block. Violations may attract penalties of up to R1 million or 10% of annual turnover.

The law is stronger. The machinery remains unfinished.

As of mid-August, applications to the registry were open, but the Commission had not announced a date for its full launch. Every month between regulation and enforcement is another month in which compliant businesses incur costs while reckless operators continue largely undisturbed.

The registry cannot solve the entire problem. Legitimate marketers may obey it. Criminal syndicates will not. Their calls require network-level detection, enforcement against disguised numbers, action against illegal SIM boxes and better cooperation between mobile operators, ICASA, banks and law-enforcement agencies.

Consumers should block suspicious numbers, preserve call records and report companies that ignore an instruction to stop. They should never disclose a PIN, password or one-time code to an incoming caller. But the answer cannot be to make every individual the final regulator of a telecommunications industry.

The cost of spam is no longer measured only in irritation. Schools, doctors, employers, delivery drivers and emergency services now struggle to reach people who have been taught that an unknown number is probably hostile.

A country in which nobody answers the phone has not defeated spam.

Spam has defeated the phone.