UK Mobile Operators Blocked 97.1 Million Scam SMS Messages in Jan 2026
Industry trade body Mobile UK, which represents EE, O2 and VodafoneThree (Vodafone and Three UK), has revealed that mobile operators have, to date, blocked an overall total of 2.7 billion scam SMS (text) messages (2,761,912,183 to be exact) from reaching customers and 97.1 Million of that total occurred in January 2026 alone.
Most of the United Kingdom’s major broadband, phone and mobile network operators have already implemented various technical measures to tackle things like Nuisance Calls, Scam Calls and Scam Texts. Mobile operators typically block an estimated 600 million+ such messages each year, although this figure tends to rise with time as both the quantity of messages increases and the detection systems get better at stopping them.
Now Mobile UK has moved to help shine a greater light on these efforts by launching a new tracker that will be updated monthly. The tracker is fairly simple and shows how many scam SMS messages were blocked during the prior month and how many have been blocked in total to date across UK mobile networks (we only wish it gave a figure for each network). The page also includes various details for consumers on how to report and tackle such messages.
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We should point out that Ofcom are also busy developing new industry rules and solutions with mobile operators to help further tackle messaging scams (example).
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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I wonder how many false positives there are with this, might explain why my opticians messages never get through to me and others.