Overview
- Meta deactivated more than 6.8 million fraudulent WhatsApp accounts in the first half of 2025 as part of its crackdown on organized scam networks
- The new group security view alerts users when unknown contacts add them to groups by displaying member counts, saved-contact info and group creation dates while allowing silent exits without opening chats
- Individual chat alerts notify users when a message arrives from someone outside their contacts by providing context about the sender before they respond
- WhatsApp collaborated with OpenAI to dismantle a Cambodian fraud center that used ChatGPT to generate persuasive, multilingual scam messages before moving victims to private channels
- Security experts recommend enabling two-step verification, verifying contacts off-app, never sharing verification codes and reporting or blocking suspicious numbers and international-prefix calls