WhatsApp is introducing new features to help people find fraud on messaging services, the company announced Tuesday. The company also said it has deleted more than 6.8 million WhatsApp accounts linked to crime fraud centres targeting people around the world.
The new feature is designed to help detect fraud in both groups and individual chats on meta-owned platforms.
For group chat, WhatsApp is launching a safety overview feature that appears when people who are not in their contact list are added to a new group that is not recognised. The safety overview includes important information about the group and tips for staying safe.
For example, check if the person who added you is one of your contacts and if a member of the group is your contact.
If you decide that you might recognize a group, you can watch the chat for more context. In any case, notifications from the chat will be muted until you mark them as they want to remain in the group.
Image credit: WhatsApp
Regarding individual chats, WhatsApp points out that scammers may try to start a conversation elsewhere on the internet before asking for messages about private messaging services like WhatsApp. To protect against this tactic, the app is testing new ways to warn people before they start talking to people who can try to scam.
For example, I'm working to warn people when they start chatting with people who are not in their contacts by displaying additional context about who the message is.
WhatsApp also shared information about how it worked with Openai to disrupt the scam efforts traced to Cambodia's fraud centres.
“These attempts have invited others to introduce themselves to the pyramid scheme of rental scooters, or to invest in cryptocurrency, from offering fake preference payments,” Whatsapp explained in a blog post.
“As Openai reported, the scammer used ChatGPT to generate the first text message containing a link to a WhatsApp chat, quickly directing the target to the telegram, where he was assigned a task that he liked Tiktok's videos. The scammer tried to build trust in the scheme by the target already “earned” by the target, seeking that the target had already “earned.”
According to WhatsApp, users can spend time protecting themselves from fraud before answering to consider whether a message reads like a legitimate task. After that, you need to question whether the request makes sense and whether they are making you take action. If they claim to be friends or family, they should use a different communication method to verify their identity.