WhatsApp is stepping up efforts to help people spot scams by releasing new tools to protect them. In a blog post on Tuesday, the Meta-owned company announced that it took down over 6.8 million WhatsApp accounts linked to criminal scam centres around the world, in the first six months of the year.
As part of its ongoing efforts to protect people from scams, WhatsApp is releasing new anti-scam tools to help people detect scams in both group and private chats. Whenever someone who is not in your contact list adds you to a group you may not recognise, WhatsApp will immediately display a new safety overview showing the key information about the group, with options to “Exit group” or “See chat.” Whichever option you choose, WhatsApp says chat notifications from the group will be muted until you mark that you want to stay in the group.
It is not uncommon for scammers to reach out to individuals directly via private chats. WhatsApp says it will now caution users by displaying some safety tips when they start a chat with someone not on their contact list. The messages will encourage you to pause before responding to the unknown person, make you question the request from the unknown person, or enable you to verify them if they claim to be a friend or family member.
In the blog post, WhatsApp also shared many ways by which scammers operate by starting the conversation on different platforms before directing the target to WhatsApp.
“Scams may start with a text message or on a dating app, then move to social media, private messaging apps and ultimately payment or crypto platforms,” WhatsApp shared. “In the course of just one scam, they often try to cycle people through many different platforms to ensure that any one service has only a limited view into the entire scam, making it more challenging to detect.”
“As OpenAI reported, the scammers used ChatGPT to generate the initial text message containing a link to a WhatsApp chat, and then quickly directed the target to Telegram where they were assigned a task of liking videos on TikTok. The scammers attempted to build trust in their scheme by sharing how much the target has already ‘earned’ in theory, before asking them to deposit money into a crypto account as the next task.”
The new features are rolling out already to all users globally.
Images: WhatsApp
