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Image: File
Meta‑owned WhatsApp is ramping up its defences against increasingly complex messaging scams.
According to its latest report, between January and June 2025, the platform proactively banned over 6.8 million accounts linked to criminal scam centres, particularly in Southeast Asia, before they could launch fraudulent campaigns.
The company introduced a new “safety overview” feature for group invitations from unknown contacts.
This interstitial page offers details such as who created the group, how many members it has, and whether any of them are in your contacts, giving users a chance to leave before seeing any messages.
Notifications remain muted until you actively opt in.
WhatsApp also rolled out experimental alerts in one-on-one chats, where users attempting to message numbers not in their contacts receive contextual warnings, helping them pause and assess the legitimacy of the conversation.
According to The Washington Post, Meta is heavily leaning into AI and machine learning to detect scam accounts early.
In collaboration with OpenAI, WhatsApp helped dismantle a Cambodia-based scam network that used ChatGPT to generate personalised outreach messages, steering victims from WhatsApp to Telegram and then guiding them through TikTok tasks before requesting cryptocurrency payments.
These tools target red-flag patterns, such as scammers using advance-fee scams, pyramid schemes, fake crypto investments, or urgent job pitches and moving users across platforms to evade individual detection systems.
Meta and WhatsApp offer these four recommendations for staying safe:
Enable two-step verification to deter unauthorised access.
Never share verification codes with anyone, even if they seem to be trusted contacts.
Pause before responding to suspicious messages—especially those demanding upfront payments or pushing urgency.
Confirm identities via separate channels if someone claims to be a friend or family member asking for money
