Meta strengthens WhatsApp’s anti-scam protection with AI

Meta is rolling out an optional AI Scam Alert feature on WhatsApp that uses on-device machine learning to identify potentially fraudulent messages and warn users, strengthening its anti-scam protection.

The feature is currently being introduced in a limited beta and displays a warning in the chat when a message is deemed likely to be part of a scam, Caliber.Az reports, citing The Verge.

The warning is visible only to the user receiving it, who can then choose to block or report the sender or continue the conversation.

If the warning is considered a mistake, users can mark the chat as trusted. This removes the warning and prevents Scam Alert from flagging the same chat again. Users who mark a conversation as trusted can also choose to share their five most recent received messages with WhatsApp to help improve the system’s accuracy.

Meta said the feature is designed to address scams increasingly targeting WhatsApp’s more than 3 billion users, including fraudulent money transfers and so-called pig-butchering schemes. According to the US Federal Trade Commission, users reported losing $425 million to scams on WhatsApp in 2025, out of more than $2.1 billion lost to social media scams overall.

The company said that when scam detection is enabled, “no message content leaves the user device for classification” and that warnings are not “auto-reported to WhatsApp, Meta, or anyone else.”

Users can disable Scam Alert at any time.

By Bakhtiyar Abbasov