In the current digital age, scammers are getting smarter. From fake officials and fraudulent businesses to suspicious one-time passwords, online scams at present are designed to look convincing and create a sense of urgency. To empower people to stay one step ahead, WhatsApp offers multiple layers of protection and safety tools that can help strengthen account security, spot suspicious activity, and give people control over who contacts them.
Five Anti-scam Tools on WhatsApp That Help Stay Safe
- Silence Unknown Callers: Enabling the feature helps to automatically screen out spam, scams, and calls from unknown people, including potential scammers for increased protection. Users can see silenced calls from unknown callers in the Calls tab and notifications.
- Context Cards: Scammers often rely on people acting in a state of urgency and panic before noticing the warning signs. Context cards in individual chats and groups provide people with additional information like if someone is a contact, and they have groups in common, whether their phone number is registered in a different country and if the account is recently created, all of which are indicators of potential scams. From there, people can make an informed decision if they should reply, add them as a contact, block them or report them.
- Screenshare Warning: WhatsApp prompts people with warnings when they attempt to share their screens with an unknown contact during a video call. Scammers may pressure their targets to share their screen to trick people into giving away sensitive information including bank details or verification codes. With this safety tool WhatsApp gives users more context to spot and avoid scams.
- WhatsApp device linking warning: Scammers may try to trick people into linking their WhatsApp account to their device under false pretenses. To stay ahead of these tactics, WhatsApp alerts users when behavioral signals suggest a linking request might be suspicious, including showing users where the request is coming from and displaying a clear warning that it may be a scam, giving people the chance to pause and reconsider before it happens.
- Two-Step Verification: Enabling Two-Step Verification adds an additional layer of security to users’ WhatsApp account which requires a six-digit PIN when resetting and verifying the WhatsApp account. This helps protect people in situations where scammers attempt to take over accounts through unauthorized access to verification codes.
