WhatsApp adds scam protection tools

WhatsApp has detected. Similarly, banished nearly 7 million accounts designed this year to scam users of American messaging, and will add protection tools, according to a blog post published on Tuesday.

“Our team spotted the accounts. In addition, deactivated them before the criminal organizations that created them could use it,” said Clair Deevy, a WhatsApp, a subsidiary of Meta (Facebook, Instagram), during a press briefing.

These 6.8 million accounts, blocked in the first half, “had not yet sent messages,” she insisted.

According to the company. Therefore, scam messages, promising easy money via cryptocurrency investments or fictitious jobs, come largely from forced work camps, managed by criminal groups in Southeast Asia.

The suspicious accounts are identified in particular thanks to cooperation with other companies. because they arise on various applications and social networks at the same time.

Clair whatsapp adds scam protection tools Deevy has given the example of an operation piloted from Cambodia, dismantled by Meta and Openai, the Chatgpt publisher.

“Schools use Chatgpt to generate the initial message containing a link to a WhatsApp conversation. Then. the victims were quickly redirected to (encrypted messaging) Telegram, where they are allocated a task of + Liker + videos on Tiktok, “she detailed.

Criminals seek to establish a relationship of trust with their targets. before going to the following task: file money on cryptocurrency accounts.

Meta also announced the addition of a feature to warn users when they have been added to a WhatsApp group made up of people they do not know. which could be fraudulent.

“You can leave the group without even examining the conversation,” said the company.

Meta has been fighting for years to protect users from its services from potential manipulations. scams, especially since the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

This British whatsapp adds scam protection tools consulting firm had raised. without authorization and without their knowledge, the personal data of tens of millions of Facebook users, then used for political targeting during the 2016 US electoral campaign.

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has enabled cybersecurity teams to automate threat detection on a large scale.

But generative AI, like Chatgpt and other AI assistants, now allows crooks to produce more convincing and perfected scams.

The authorities of many countries are also demanding access to messaging like WhatsApp. encrypted from Bout-en-Bout to protect personal and professional communications.