WhatsApp removes 6.8 million accounts linked to criminal scam sites

NEW YORK —WhatsApp has removed 6.8 million accounts linked to criminal scams targeting people online worldwide , parent company Meta said.

The account deletions, which Meta said occurred during the first six months of the year, are part of the company's broader efforts to combat scams.

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In an announcement Tuesday, Meta said it was also rolling out new tools on WhatsApp to help people spot scams, including a new safety overview that the platform will display when someone not in a user's contacts adds them to a group, as well as continuous test alerts to pause before responding.

Scams are becoming all too common and increasingly sophisticated in today's digital world, with too-good-to-be-true offers and unsolicited messages attempting to steal consumers' information or money filling our phones, social media feeds, and other corners of the internet every day. Meta noted that "some of the most prolific sources" of scams are criminal scam hubs, which often stem from forced labor operated by organized crime, and warned that such efforts often target people on multiple platforms at once in attempts to evade detection.

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That means a scam campaign can start with text messages or a dating app, for example, and then move to social media and payment platforms, the California-based company noted.

Meta, which also owns Facebook and Instagram, pointed to recent scam efforts that it said attempted to use its own apps, as well as TikTok, Telegram, and AI-generated messages using ChatGPT, to offer payments for fake “likes,” recruit people into a pyramid scheme, and/or lure others into cryptocurrency investments. Meta linked these scams to a criminal scam center in Cambodia and said it shut down the campaign in partnership with OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT.