Abstract In this paper, a novel spatial and directional modulation scheme with scrambling (SDM-S) is proposed toward secure wireless transmission. Compared to the conventional directional modulation scheme with cooperative receivers (DM-CR), the proposed SDM-S scheme is capable of increasing the throughput without degrading the secrecy performance. Specifically, we introduce a scrambling matrix to impose barrier for the eavesdropper and introduce the concept of spatial modulation (SM) to directional modulation (DM) systems for the sake of increasing the system throughput. Furthermore, an upper bound is derived to theoretically analyze the average bit error probability (ABEP) of the proposed scheme. Our performance results demonstrate that, the proposed SDM-S scheme is capable of increasing the throughput than its conventional DM-CR counterpart, while guaranteeing the information security regardless of the location or direction of the eavesdropper.