Phone scams: can you beat them?

According to a 2017 report by the International Telecoms Week Global Leaders' Forum, which brings together the world's leading operators, phone scams cost the telecoms industry $17 billion a year. Although there are no global figures on users, a study by Truecaller, a company specializing in call filtering applications, estimates that these scams cost Americans 29.8 billion euros in 2021.

Although operators have set up detection and prevention teams, and private individuals have been made aware of the risk, this scourge remains omnipresent. Nothing seems to be able to eradicate it. Economists Elif Kubilay, Eva Raiber, Lisa Spantig, Jana Cahlíková and Lucy Kaaria examined the ability of individuals to identify SMS fraud attempts and the effectiveness of scam awareness, focusing on Kenya.

About

Dialogues économiques is a digital journal published by the Aix-Marseille School of Economics (amU, CNRS, EHESS, Centrale Méditerranée). A gateway between academic research and society, Dialogues économiques provides all citizens with the keys to economic reasoning. Articles are published every two weeks.

In Kenya, the cell phone is king

Why Kenya? The country is Africa's tech Eldorado. In the capital Nairobi, nicknamed the "Silicon Savannah", everything can be ordered and paid for by phone: cabs, shopping, clothes, etc. The country is also the birthplace of M-pesa, an online payment system widely adopted across the country and in several neighboring countries. To date, 96% of Kenyan households have a mobile money account¹.

However, one of the country's particularities is the low presence of the smartphone. According to statistics from the Communications Authority (CA), Kenya had 30.8 million active smartphones at the end of 2023, representing a penetration rate of 60.9% of the 62.9 million cell phones connected to the network. Feature phones, which provide basic Internet access, account for 63.5% of all cell phones.