WhatsApp, the popular smartphone messaging service, says it’s cracking down on millions of accounts linked to scam networks and providing users new tools to alert them when they might be targeted.
In a post on Tuesday, the Meta-owned service says it took down more than 6.8 million accounts linked to scam networks primarily based in Southeast Asia. WhatsApp said that many of them are driven by cryptocurrency investment scams and pyramid schemes, and that some use ChatGPT to generate text and links that may send users to other apps.
WhatsApp says that for users, it’s adding new safeguards to group messaging and individual messages that will warn users when someone who’s not in their contacts list tries to initiate a chat or add them to a group messaging thread.
Overall, the service is advising that users take more time to consider responding to a chat request and to verify whether someone trying to contact them is who they say they are. Using a secondary form of communication is one way to do that, WhatsApp says: “If they messaged you on WhatsApp, call them on their phone – or if they sent you an SMS, give them a WhatsApp call using the phone number you know is theirs.”
WhatsApp is the world’s most widely used encrypted messaging app.
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