Claim: Pakistan is a safer nation as compared to India and the United States, according to a list of the World’s Safest Countries for 2025.
Fact: The statistics are from Numbeo, a website that provides the listing based on perceptions and opinions crowdsourced through a brief survey, not actual official data. Therefore, it is an unreliable source of rankings.
On 27 March 2025, Instagram page @thenewsify.pk posted (archive) a visual showing a group of young men standing in front of Islamabad’s Faisal Mosque while holding the Pakistani flag, as well as the text, “Pakistan Safer Than India And The US In List of World’s Safest Countries For 2025”.
The accompanying caption reads as follows:
“The ranking is based on cr!me [crime] data, including property cri_mes [crimes], viol_ence [violence], and personal saf_ety [safety] perceptions. The United States ranked 89th on the list of the world’s safest countries for 2025, falling behind both India (66) and Pakistan (65), according to the latest list by Numbeo.”
Some of the words in the aforementioned caption include exclamation marks or underscores. This is a self-censoring technique used — sometimes redundantly — on social media platforms in order to dodge algorithmic censorship, as described in a research paper by Talia A. Feshbach, a generative artificial intelligence (AI) associate. In other cases, slashes and asterisks are also used to circumvent the viewership of posts from being reduced or censored.
Fact or Fiction?
Soch Fact Check reviewed Numbeo, the Serbian website mentioned in the caption, and observed that the rankings and statistics are based on perceptions of individuals, as opposed to actual figures, and none of them is verified by experts. While this information might be useful, it may be entirely inaccurate as it is unregulated and the data collected cannot be used to make the claim we are investigating.
According to Numbeo itself, the data “is derived from surveys answered by website visitors” and the index includes survey responses about “general perception of crime levels,” “perceived safety during daylight and nighttime,” “concerns about specific crimes (mugging, robbery, car theft, physical attacks, public harassment, and bias-motivated incidents),” “property crime severity (burglary, theft, vandalism),” and “violent crime severity (assault, homicide, sexual offenses)”.
In a clarification, it states, “It’s important to note that the Numbeo’s Crime Index is based [on] user-contributed perceptions, which may differ from official government statistics.” It also says the figures are based on people’s “perceptions”, “concerns” of potential visitors, and “severity” of crimes.
The same bases were observed in a survey on crime in Pakistan that we opened to check the questions. It shows that anyone who wishes to rate a country does not need to have ever visited the place they are assessing. They just need to have Internet access and a motive.
Moreover, rankings would vary because the number of contributors for each country is different; there are 2,305 contributors for Pakistan, 8,184 for India, and 19,572 for the US. It is unclear how the website weighs each contribution or if it even assigns weightages.
Each country also has varying numbers of cities ranked; Pakistan has four available, India has 19, and the US has 44. Numbeo notes that the data is “based on perceptions of visitors of this website in the past 5 years”.
We also came across two statements in Numbeo’s Terms of Use that distance the website from any responsibility; these read as follows:
- “The structure of the project allows anyone with an Internet connection to modify its content. Please be advised that nothing found here has necessarily been reviewed by people with the expertise required to provide you with complete, accurate or reliable information. Use our content at your own risk.”
- “No warranty whatsoever is made that any of the data or articles are accurate. There is absolutely no assurance that any statement on the website is correct or precise.”
Separately, when we checked Numbeo’s Crime Index by Country for 2025, we found that Pakistan, India, and the US are ranked 83, 81, and 59, respectively. The respective Crime and Safety indices are 43.7 and 56.3 for Pakistan, 44.3 and 55.7 for India, and 49.2 and 50.8 for the US.
It is interesting to note that according to a 2017 article by The Local, a Swedish man called Linus Trulsson conducted an experiment to prove that online crowdsourced databases are unreliable. It says he managed to pull the “sleepy” university town of Lund to the top of the list as the world’s most dangerous city by giving it “the worst possible ranking in all of the review categories, multiple times”.
Trulsson did so after he saw “stories being spread on Twitter about crime” in Malmö and after journalist Kolbjörn Guwallius spoke about dubious ranking websites, the publication wrote.
When we searched if other media outlets accredited by the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) had looked into Numbeo, we found that Myth Detector, Africa Check, AFP Fact Check and its French version, and ANNIE Lab have drawn similar conclusions in their respective investigations.
Africa Check quoted Numbeo founder and CEO Mladen Adamovic as stating that his website did not claim that the index ranked the world’s most dangerous cities. “For as long as I remember, we haven’t suggested that,” he said, according to the publication.
Soch Fact Check, therefore, rates the claim false as the index is unreliable due to its crowdsourced content and a lack of transparency regarding its contributors and methodology.
Virality
Soch Fact Check found one of the most viral posts on Facebook here.
The claim was also posted on Threads here.
Conclusion: The statistics are from Numbeo, a website that provides the listing based on perceptions and opinions crowdsourced through a brief survey, not actual official data. Therefore, it is an unreliable source of rankings.
Background image in cover photo: Unsplash
To appeal against our fact-check, please send an email to appeals@sochfactcheck.com