WhatsApp takes down over 6.8m accounts linked to scam centres

Meta said it had closed more than 6.8 million WhatsApp accounts linked to criminal scam centres.

According to the tech giant, six months of investigations led to the identification and closure of the accounts before the scam centres became operational.

The company said these scam centres are often fuelled by forced labour and run by organised crime, mainly in Southeast Asia. It added that they also typically run many scam campaigns simultaneously from cryptocurrency investments to pyramid schemes.

“There is always a catch and it should be a red flag for everyone: you have to pay upfront to get promised returns or earnings,” Meta said.

In a recent investigation, WhatsApp, Meta, and peers at OpenAI thwarted several scam attempts that traced back to a criminal hub based in Cambodia.

Scam attempts ranged from offering payments for fake likes and recruiting people into a pyramid scheme involving scooter rentals to luring people into investing in cryptocurrencies.

“As OpenAI reported, the scammers used ChatGPT to generate the initial text message containing a link to a WhatsApp chat, and then quickly directed the target to Telegram where they were assigned a task of liking videos on TikTok,” explained the company.

The news comes after the tech giant recently announced the rollout of new WhatsApp tools to help people spot scams and stay safe while messaging. 

The company is rolling out a new security overview that will show users when someone who is not in their contacts adds them to a new WhatsApp group that they may not recognise, providing key information about the group and tips for staying safe.

From there, users will be able to leave the group without ever having to look at the chat.

The company is also testing a new approach to warn people to pause before engaging with potential scammers who are increasingly attempting to initiate conversations with users on the internet and asking them to continue the conversation via the private messaging service.