WhatsApp takes down 6.8 million accounts linked to criminal scam centres, Meta says

A WhatsApp app icon is seen on a smartphone in New York on Feb. 19, 2014. (AP Photo/Patrick Sison)

NEW YORK — WhatsApp has taken down 6.8 million accounts that were “linked to criminal scam centres” targeting people online around that world, its parent company Meta said this week.

The account deletions, which Meta said took place over the first six months of the year, arrive as part of wider company efforts to crack down on scams. In a Tuesday announcement, Meta said it was also rolling new tools on WhatsApp to help people spot scams — including a new safety overview that the platform will show when someone who is not in a user’s contacts adds them to a group, as well as ongoing test alerts to pause before responding.

Scams are becoming all too common and increasingly sophisticated in today’s digital world — with too-good-to-be-true offers and unsolicited messages attempting to steal consumers’ information or money filling our phones, social media and other corners of the internet each day. Meta noted that “some of the most prolific” sources of scams are criminal scam centres, which often span from forced labor operated by organized crime — and warned that such efforts often target people on many platforms at once, in attempts to evade detection.

That means that a scam campaign may start with messages over text or a dating app, for example, and then move to social media and payment platforms, the California-based company said.

Meta, which also owns Facebook and Instagram, pointed to recent scam efforts that it said attempted to use its own apps — as well as TikTok, Telegram and AI-generated messages made using ChatGPT — to offer payments for fake likes, enlist people into a pyramid scheme and/or lure others into cryptocurrency investments. Meta linked these scams to a criminal scam centre in Cambodia — and said it disrupted the campaign in partnership with ChatGPT maker OpenAI.

The Associated Press