Abstract:
In June this year, it was reported that WhatsApp was developing a “fraud alert” function. Meta officially introduced the feature more than two weeks ago, but WhatsApp has not announced the exact time it will be rolled out to all users. However, as some Android users who have joined the WhatsApp test program can already use this feature, the official release may not be far away.
WABetaInfo found that the "Fraud Alert" function has appeared in the WhatsApp Android version test version 2.26.34.1. As the name suggests, the feature alerts users when new messages from unknown contacts appear to be scams without letting the sender know that the recipient is using the scam alert feature.
After receiving a fraud alert, users can mark the sender as trustworthy, or directly block and report the sender. If users choose to mark a chat as trusted, they can also share the last five messages in that conversation with WhatsApp to help improve the feature’s recognition accuracy.
Since the fraud alert is an optional feature, users need to manually turn it on in the "Settings" > "Account" menu of the WhatsApp Android version.
Meta stated in an official blog post that WhatsApp’s scam alert is a “new optional feature” that will alert users to potential scam messages through a machine learning model running on the device.
Meta further explained that message content will not leave the user's device for classification, nor will it be automatically reported to WhatsApp, Meta or any other agency. This feature allows users to choose whether to enable fraud alerts while retaining end-to-end encryption; when the model determines that a message is likely to be a scam, the system will issue a prompt to the user.
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