25+ Spam Statistics: Email, SMS, Robocalls & Phishing (2026)

Spam is the oldest tax the internet still collects. Every minute, a torrent of unsolicited email, robocalls, smishing texts, and phishing lures pours into inboxes, voicemail queues, and SMS apps, and somebody has to pay for the filters, the lost productivity, the wire-fraud claw-backs, and the hours spent un-checking the box that auto-subscribed you at checkout. The math is brutal: more than half of all email sent globally is still spam, robocalls hit the US at a rate of roughly 4 billion per month, and the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center logged record losses from phishing and business email compromise in 2025. Below are 27 spam statistics we could verify against primary sources for 2026, grouped into the seven themes that matter most for marketers, security teams, and shoppers trying to keep their inboxes and phones usable.

Share of Email That Is Spam

1. 46.8% of global email traffic was spam in 2025.

Statista's long-running tracker of global email traffic puts the spam share at 46.8% in 2025, down from a peak above 71% in 2014 but still nearly half of all messages ever sent. The decline reflects two decades of filtering, authentication standards like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, and the migration of bulk senders to apps and SMS. The volume itself, however, keeps climbing because total email volume keeps climbing. (Statista)

2. Roughly 160 billion spam emails are sent every day worldwide.

Cisco Talos and Spamhaus together estimate global spam volume at 100 to 160 billion messages per day in 2025, with seasonal spikes around Black Friday, tax season, and major geopolitical events. The volume floor in Spamhaus's daily snapshot rarely drops below 80 billion. (Cisco Talos)

3. Russia, the United States, and China are the top three spam-originating countries.

Kaspersky's 2024 Spam and Phishing report identified Russia (24.0% of global spam by origin), the United States (10.1%), and China (8.6%) as the top three source countries. Germany, the Netherlands, and Japan rounded out the next tier. The ranking shifts modestly each quarter, but the top three have been largely stable since 2022. (Kaspersky Spam and Phishing Report)

4. The single largest phishing target is the financial services sector.

The APWG's Q4 2024 Phishing Activity Trends Report names financial institutions as the most-targeted industry, accounting for 23.4% of all observed phishing attacks, followed by SaaS and webmail (20.1%) and social media (12.8%). (APWG)

Phishing Volumes and Business Email Compromise

5. APWG observed 989,123 phishing attacks in Q1 2024.

The APWG Phishing Activity Trends Report logged 989,123 unique phishing attacks in the first quarter of 2024, just below the all-time record of 1,077,501 set in Q1 2023. The total for full-year 2023 exceeded 4.99 million attacks, making it the highest year on record at the time of publication. (APWG Phishing Activity Trends Report)

6. Business email compromise drained $2.9 billion from US victims in 2024.

The FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center's 2024 Internet Crime Report counted 21,442 BEC complaints with adjusted losses of $2.9 billion, making BEC the second-most-costly cybercrime category after investment fraud. The average loss per reported BEC incident was roughly $135,000. (FBI IC3)

7. Phishing was the most-reported cybercrime in the US for the fifth year running.

The same IC3 report logged 193,407 phishing and spoofing complaints in 2024, more than any other cybercrime category, though the per-incident dollar loss is lower than BEC or investment scams. Total reported losses across all crime types reached $16.6 billion, a 33% jump from 2023. (FBI IC3)

8. The average cost of a phishing-initiated breach was $4.88 million in 2024.

IBM's 2024 Cost of a Data Breach Report puts the average global cost of a breach where phishing was the initial attack vector at $4.88 million, up 10% from $4.45 million in 2023. BEC-initiated breaches averaged the same $4.88 million figure. Stolen credential breaches, which often start with phishing, took the longest to identify and contain at 292 days. (IBM Cost of a Data Breach 2024)

9. 71% of phishing attacks in 2024 used HTTPS.

APWG also reports that 71% of phishing sites in 2024 used HTTPS, meaning the green padlock no longer means a site is safe. Attackers acquire free domain-validated TLS certificates the same way legitimate small sites do, then host lookalike login pages on subdomains designed to mimic well-known brands. (APWG)

Robocalls and SMS Spam

10. Americans received 50.3 billion robocalls in 2024.

The YouMail Robocall Index, the most widely cited US robocall tracker, logged 50.3 billion robocalls in 2024, averaging 4.2 billion calls per month or about 137 million per day. The full-year total was down from a 2019 peak of 58.5 billion but still represented roughly 152 calls per US adult. (YouMail Robocall Index)

11. 38% of 2024 robocalls were classified as scams or telemarketing.

YouMail breaks robocall volume into four buckets: alerts and reminders, payment reminders, telemarketing, and scams. In 2024, scams alone accounted for an estimated 23% of all robocalls, and unwanted telemarketing added another 15%, for a combined unwanted share of 38%. (YouMail Robocall Index)

12. Hiya identified spam in 17% of all US calls in 2024.

Hiya's 2025 State of the Phone Call report analyzed billions of calls across its global network and found that 17% of US calls were flagged as unwanted, spam, or fraud, slightly down from 19% in 2023. Globally the spam call rate was 7.7%, with Brazil (45%) and Chile (44%) topping the table. (Hiya State of the Phone Call)

13. The average US person receives roughly 4 spam calls per week.

Truecaller's 2024 Insights report estimated US users receive an average of 4 spam calls per week, with seasonal spikes around tax filing season and the Medicare open enrollment window. Truecaller blocked 26 billion spam calls globally in 2024 across its app installs. (Truecaller Insights)

14. Americans received 19.2 billion spam texts in March 2024 alone.

Robokiller's monthly tracker measured 19.2 billion spam SMS messages in March 2024, the highest single month on record. Full-year 2024 spam text volume topped 200 billion in the US, with package delivery scams, fake bank fraud alerts, and political messaging dominating the mix. (Robokiller)

15. SMS spam grew 700% faster than voice spam between 2021 and 2024.

The same Robokiller dataset shows that spam SMS volume grew roughly 7 times faster than robocall volume over the period, driven by lower per-message costs, easier spoofing of short codes, and the rise of A2P (application-to-person) messaging platforms abused by scammers. (Robokiller)

Top Spam Categories and Themes

16. Fake delivery notifications were the top phishing theme in 2024.

Kaspersky's 2024 Spam and Phishing report identified fake parcel and delivery notifications (impersonating DHL, FedEx, USPS, and regional carriers) as the single most common phishing lure, used in roughly 18% of attacks. Fake bank security alerts came second at 15%, and fake streaming or subscription billing notices took third at 11%. (Kaspersky Spam and Phishing Report)

17. Cryptocurrency scams accounted for 23% of advance-fee fraud in 2024.

The FBI IC3 report tracks crypto investment fraud as a separate category and recorded $5.8 billion in losses in 2024 across 69,484 complaints. Roughly 23% of classic advance-fee or romance scams now route victim payments into crypto wallets rather than wire transfers, reflecting the shift toward harder-to-recover payment rails. (FBI IC3)

18. Romance and confidence scams cost US victims $672 million in 2024.

The IC3 report counted 17,823 romance scam complaints with $672 million in losses, and AARP separately estimates the true figure is 5 to 10 times higher because most victims never report. Many romance scams begin as spam DMs or unsolicited SMS contacts. (FBI IC3)

19. Tech-support scams cost older Americans $589 million in 2024.

Tech-support fraud, often initiated by spam pop-ups or robocalls claiming to be from Microsoft, Apple, or a bank's fraud department, generated 36,002 complaints and $589 million in losses in 2024, with victims over 60 accounting for the majority of losses. (FBI IC3)

20. Dating and adult-content spam fell to under 4% of total spam in 2024.

Kaspersky reports that adult-content and dating spam, once the dominant category in the 2000s, fell to under 4% of total spam volume in 2024, displaced by phishing lures, fake-invoice campaigns, and crypto-investment pitches that monetize more reliably per impression. (Kaspersky Spam and Phishing Report)

Detection and ML Filtering Effectiveness

21. Gmail's filters block more than 99.9% of spam, phishing, and malware.

Google publicly reports that Gmail's machine learning filters block more than 99.9% of spam, phishing, and malware attempts before they reach the inbox, processing more than 100 million additional phishing emails blocked each day on top of the baseline filter. Google introduced TensorFlow-based ML filtering in 2019 and has been compounding gains ever since. (Google)

22. Microsoft 365 blocks roughly 35.7 billion phishing emails per year.

Microsoft's annual Digital Defense Report disclosed that Microsoft 365 Defender blocks roughly 35.7 billion phishing emails per year aimed at enterprise customers, alongside 25.6 billion attempts to brute-force enterprise accounts. (Microsoft Digital Defense Report)

23. DMARC adoption among Fortune 500 companies reached 91% in 2024.

The Global Cyber Alliance's 2024 DMARC adoption tracker found that 91% of Fortune 500 companies published a DMARC record in 2024, up from 73% in 2022, though only 40% had moved to the strictest enforcement policy (p=reject). DMARC, combined with SPF and DKIM, is the single most effective sender-authentication layer against email spoofing. (Global Cyber Alliance)

24. ML-based spam filters reduced false positives by 27% between 2020 and 2024.

Industry benchmarks from Cisco Talos's email security reporting show that modern transformer-based spam filters reduced false positives (legitimate mail flagged as spam) by roughly 27% between 2020 and 2024, while catch rates for new phishing campaigns rose from 96% to 99.4% over the same period. (Cisco Talos)

Anti-Spam Regulation and Enforcement

25. The FCC issued more than $300 million in robocall-related fines in 2023.

The FCC's 2023 enforcement total included a $299.9 million fine against a single auto-warranty robocall operation, the largest robocall fine in agency history. The TRACED Act, signed in 2019, gave the FCC expanded authority to act faster against illegal callers and required STIR/SHAKEN caller-ID authentication on all major US carriers. (FCC)

26. CAN-SPAM violations carry penalties up to $51,744 per email.

The US CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 sets civil penalties of up to $51,744 per non-compliant email under the 2024 FTC penalty schedule, with each non-compliant email treated as a separate violation. ISPs can also sue spammers under the act, and several class-action settlements have exceeded $1 million. (FTC)

27. GDPR enforcement against unsolicited marketing has produced over EUR 350 million in fines.

Since GDPR took effect in 2018, EU data protection authorities have issued more than EUR 350 million in fines tied specifically to unsolicited marketing, cookie consent failures, and inadequate opt-out mechanisms. The single largest unsolicited-marketing fine was a EUR 9 million penalty against Vodafone Italia in 2020. (European Data Protection Board)

Frequently Asked Questions

Spam in 2026 is no longer just about ugly inboxes. It is the delivery vehicle for billions of dollars in fraud, the source of nearly half of all email ever sent, and the reason every legitimate marketer now has to authenticate, opt-in, and disclose. The smart play for shoppers is simple: trust verified codes, distrust unsolicited urgency, and never type a credential into a link that arrived by surprise. At 99coupons.ai, that is why every code we surface is editor-checked against the merchant, so the only thing landing in your inbox is the discount you actually wanted.