WhatsApp introduces new safety feature to combat scam groups

WhatsApp has rolled out a ‘Safety Overview’ feature to protect users from being added to unknown groups, as part of a broader anti-scam push. Over 6.8 million scam-linked accounts were banned, with operations disrupted across Southeast Asia

New Delhi: WhatsApp has launched a new ‘safety overview’, which will alert a user when someone not in their contact adds them to a new WhatsApp group that they may not recognise, as the Meta’s messaging platform intensified its crackdown on scams and frauds.

The safety overview will contain key information about the said group and tips to stay safe, it said. “From there, you can exit the group without ever having to look at the chat. And if you think you might recognise the group after seeing the safety overview, you can choose to see the chat for more context,” according to WhatsApp.

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And notifications from the group will be silenced until the user marks that they do wish to stay.

Meta’s messaging platform further said it is exploring ways to caution users when they start a chat with someone not in the contacts by showing more context about the person they are messaging to. This, it hopes, will enable informed decisions.

WhatsApp said it also takes down attempts by criminal scam centres, often fuelled by forced labour and operated by organised crime primarily in South East Asia. In the first six months this year, as part of its efforts to protect people from scams, WhatsApp and Meta’s security teams detected and banned over 6.8 million accounts linked to scam centres.

“Based on our investigative insights into the latest enforcement efforts, we proactively detected and took down accounts before scam centres were able to operationalise them,” it said. Citing an instance of such crackdown, it said recently WhatsApp, Meta and OpenAI disrupted scamsters’ efforts that had links to a criminal scam centre in Cambodia.

These attempts ranged from offering payments for fake likes to enlisting others into a rent-a-scooter pyramid scheme, or luring people to invest in cryptocurrency. “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,” it said.