Bitdefender's cross-channel scam numbers, filtered through GASA

GASA is surfacing Bitdefender’s 2026 Global Scam Intelligence Report, and the framing is one the trust world keeps circling back to: scams no longer live on a single channel. A deceptive ad leads to a fraudulent site, the interaction moves to a messaging app, then a phone call, then a payment request — a coordinated campaign that follows the target across the services they use each day, and that defeats any control designed around a single point of contact.

The numbers underneath the thesis are the interesting part. Bitdefender says it drew on a twelve-month window of trillions of URLs, billions of messages, live advertising ecosystems, and call honeypots, plus a 7,000-person consumer survey. Of the text messages analyzed, 5.2% — roughly one in twenty — carried signs tied to scam infrastructure or coordinated fraud. Of nearly 150 million inbound calls to protected devices, more than 23 million were flagged unwanted: about one in six.

That one-in-six call figure is the line worth filing. It sits alongside Hiya’s State of the Call, TNS’s Robocall Investigation Report, and YouMail’s monthly index as another vendor’s read of how much of the call stream is junk — measured through a different instrument (honeypots and endpoint protection rather than carrier-side analytics), which is exactly why it’s useful to hold against the others rather than take on its own terms. Bitdefender sells cross-channel scam protection, so a report concluding that scams are cross-channel and accelerating is a report doing double duty. Take the measurement seriously; note who benefits from the framing. The cross-channel picture is real, and it’s the part a single-channel defense — carrier call authentication, an email gateway, an app-store review — can’t see on its own.