Italy's phone scam damage hits 731 million euros in a year

According to IrishDentist.ie, telephone scams cost Italians 731 million euros in the last year alone. Over 3.2 million people were hit by fraud or attempted fraud linked to fixed or mobile telephony, according to a survey run for Facile.it by the mUp Research institute and Norstat.

The average loss per case was not large. Landline scams cost victims 209 euros on average; mobile scams cost 176 euros. Small sums like these are exactly why the scam keeps working: they sit below the threshold where most people bother to report anything.

The pattern underneath the numbers

The fake call centre is still the most common route in, used in 67% of landline cases and 44.2% of mobile cases. Fraudulent emails come next, at 33% for landline and 32.6% for mobile. SMS matters more on mobile, at 25.6% against 16.5% on landline, and instant messaging apps now account for almost one in four mobile attempts.

Spoofing sits underneath much of this. It is the technique that makes a caller's number appear as something else on the screen. Agcom's anti-spoofing filter, active since 19 November 2025, blocked around 49.3 million illicit calls from abroad using counterfeit Italian numbers in just eleven days. That figure says less about scam volume and more about how much of it was arriving disguised as a domestic number, which is the part a filter can actually catch.

Who gets caught, and why it repeats

The victim profile does not match the usual assumption that older or less educated people are the ones who fall for this. On mobile, the 18 to 24 age group has a 10.7% victim rate against a national average of 6%. People with a degree are scammed more than twice as often as the average. That detail points to timing and pressure doing the work, not ignorance.

The bigger problem is what happens after. 59.4% of those defrauded never filed a report. Almost half who stayed silent, 45.7%, said the loss felt too small to bother with. Another 10.1% said embarrassment stopped them, and 7.8% did not want family or friends to find out.

That silence is the real gap in the data. A scam that never gets reported cannot be counted, matched against other reports, or used to flag a pattern before it repeats on someone else. Small, repeatable losses that go unreported are exactly the kind of pattern a system built to watch for anomalies across many small reports is designed to catch, even when no single victim thinks their case is worth mentioning.

Facile.it's five-step handbook covers the basics: telephone companies never ask for cash on the spot, only bill, bank transfer or card. Anyone asking in person for cash should be turned away. Requests for an IBAN or a migration code over the phone, tied to a claim about unpaid bills, are treated as near-certain signs of fraud.