Meta Platforms has launched a war against scammers who have infiltrated its popular messaging service WhatsApp, reportedly taking down more than 6.8 million accounts on the platform and adding features to help people identify fraudulent schemes in group and individual chats. Meta claims the scams go far beyond WhatsApp, involving crime syndicates linked to known fraud communities around the world. These criminal scam centers commonly use forced labor to target people across multiple apps, commonly disrupting WhatsApp, the mobile SMS tree that underpins private text messaging, as well as users of ChatGPT, TikTok, Telegram and blockchain.

For group chats in WhatsApp, Meta has implemented “a safety overview feature that will be displayed when someone who isn’t in your contact list adds you to a new group that you may not recognize,” reports TechCrunch, adding that “the safety overview will include key information about the group, alongside tips to stay safe.”

Displayed information includes when the group was created, the person who invited you and whether they are among your contacts, and if other group members are contacts of yours as well as the total number of members. If it looks like it might be legitimate, you can opt to see the chat for context. Either way, group chat notifications will be muted until you approve membership.

“It will also include a warning to watch out for scams, as well as information on how to limit who can invite you to group chats on WhatsApp,” reports The Verge, noting that the safety overviews feature “builds upon the ‘context card’ that WhatsApp rolled out last year.” The safety overviews “will appear as an ‘interstitial’ page when someone you might not recognize sends you an invite.”

“WhatsApp is constantly rolling out new features to help protect people on our apps from known scam tactics at scale,” Meta writes in a news post that warns scammers may reach out individually before seeking private contact via a service like WhatsApp.

A July Pew Research Center survey found that “73 percent of U.S. adults have experienced some kind of online scam or attack.”

To disrupt scam efforts linked to a criminal scam center in Cambodia Meta joined forces with OpenAI, which published a 46-page threat assessment report on scammers and AI. “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,” Meta says, noting that in the Cambodian case ChatGPT was used “to generate the initial text message containing a link to a WhatsApp chat.”

Related:
WhatsApp to Let You Chat With Non-Users and Access Profiles Faster, Digital Information World, 8/6/25
Meta Launches Updated Scam Activity Alerts in WhatsApp, Social Media Today, 8/5/25