WhatsApp has deleted 6.8 million accounts linked to criminal scam centres targeting people around the world, parent company Meta announced.
The action, taken in the first six months of the year, is part of Meta’s broader push to combat online scams. The company says these scam networks are often tied to organised crime groups running forced labour operations in so-called criminal scam centres.
Announcing the move on Tuesday, Meta revealed new WhatsApp safety tools aimed at helping users identify potential scams before engaging. These include a “safety overview” shown when someone outside a user’s contacts adds them to a group, and alerts prompting people to pause before responding to suspicious messages.
Scams are becoming more common and sophisticated, using too-good-to-be-true offers or unsolicited messages to steal personal data or money. Such schemes often operate across multiple platforms, making them harder to detect and shut down quickly.
Meta says scam campaigns can begin on dating apps or text messages before shifting to social media, payment platforms, or messaging services. Recent disruptions have targeted scams that used Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Telegram, and even AI-generated messages from ChatGPT.
These fraudulent schemes have included fake likes-for-pay offers, pyramid recruitment, and bogus cryptocurrency investments, according to the company. Meta linked one campaign to a scam centre in Cambodia, which it said was dismantled in partnership with OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT.
Meta insists that removing accounts and launching safety tools is essential, but warns scams will continue evolving to evade detection.
