WhatsApp, owned by Meta, has deleted 6.8 million accounts linked to criminal scam centers worldwide during the first half of the year.
The account removals are part of a broader crackdown by Meta on scams targeting people across various online platforms.
The big picture: Meta announced new safety tools on WhatsApp to help users spot and avoid scams, including a safety overview that appears when someone outside a user’s contacts adds them to a group.
- Additional test alerts are being introduced to encourage users to pause and think before responding to suspicious messages.
Driving the news: Scams have become more common and increasingly sophisticated, often featuring too-good-to-be-true offers and unsolicited messages trying to steal personal information or money.
- Criminal scam centers, often operated by organized crime and forced labor, are among the most prolific sources of scams. These centers target individuals across multiple platforms simultaneously to avoid detection.
- Scam campaigns may start on one platform – such as text messaging or dating apps – and then move to social media, payment platforms, and other channels as part of a coordinated effort.
- Meta highlighted recent scam campaigns that leveraged its own apps – WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram – as well as TikTok, Telegram, and AI-generated messages created with ChatGPT.
- These scams have been used to promote fake payment offers for social media likes, pyramid schemes, and fraudulent cryptocurrency investments.
Zoom in: Meta traced one major scam operation back to a criminal scam center in Cambodia and disrupted it in collaboration with OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT.
- This joint effort represents a new approach in combating scams that increasingly use artificial intelligence tools to create convincing fraudulent content.
