WhatsApp says it has taken down more than 6.8 million accounts linked to "criminal scam centers." It says scammers are using complex methods that use multiple apps to avoid being detected by any one of them.

The company, owned by Meta (which also owns Facebook), says this isn't just a case of lone actors pulling off scams. It says many are the work of full-blown organized crime gangs which exploit forced labor workers - quite often they are used in sextortion and pig butchering schemes.

While the specifics of the scams change, for example getting people to "invest" in cryptocurrency or supposedly start a business, there's a common theme. It almost always involves the victim making an up-front payment with the promise of making more money back later on.

ChatGPT's operators OpenAI describe the approach as ping/zing/sting: making initial contact, building enthusiasm with bogus claims of potential earnings, then getting the money from the victim. (Source: openai.com)

Four Apps, One Scam

Another notable element of these gangs is that they use multiple apps and platforms during the scam, often switching quickly between them. Meta gives the example of a Cambodia-based operation which used ChatGPT to mass-produce text messages. These included a link to a WhatsApp chat in which people were recruited for supposed online work.

Those who agreed were sent to messaging app Telegram for work instructions where they were told to "like" videos on TikTok. Completing this supposed task led to the victim being offered work in the cryptocurrency industry and asked to complete a training exercise to deposit money into a cryptocurrency account.

The idea of the multi-app approach is to make it much harder for any one app operator to detect a pattern of scam behavior or produce evidence to take the scammers down.

New Warnings

In response, WhatsApp is making a couple of changes to how group chats work. If somebody is added to a group by someone who is not in their phone contacts, the user won't immediately be able to see messages from the group. Instead they will be given a warning about the signs of scams and required to specifically confirm they want to see messages in the group and receive notifications.

It's also experimenting with ways to deal with scammers using other communications tools to ask the victim to contact them directly on WhatsApp. One option being tested is that when a user tries to message somebody not in their contact list for the first time, they will be shown "additional context" about the recipient. (Source: fb.com)

What's Your Opinion?

Do you use WhatsApp or similar tools? Are you confident you can spot and avoid scams on the platform? Should app operators work more closely together and share data to help build up a picture of large-scale scams?