Meta adds AI screening to detect WhatsApp scams

Meta is launching an optional Scam Alert feature on WhatsApp that uses on-device machine learning to flag suspicious messages. Earlier this year, Meta also launched scam detection for device linking requests on WhatsApp. The new Scam Alert feature, which is rolling out in a limited beta, shows users a warning if a chat seems like a scam:

If the model identifies a message as a likely scam attempt, the user sees a warning in the chat, which is not visible to the other person. From there, the user can decide what to do: block, report, or continue the conversation. If they decide that a warning is incorrectly flagged, the user can mark the chat as trusted, in which case the warning is removed and Scam Alert will not flag that chat again. If a user marks that they trust a chat, they can also opt in to share the last 5 messages received with WhatsApp to help improve the feature’s accuracy.

With more than 3 billion users, WhatsApp is among the largest areas of scam activity, like wire transfers and pig butchering scams. The FTC said victims reported losing $425 million to scams via WhatsApp alone, out of more than $2.1 billion lost to social media scams in 2025.

Meta says “no message content leaves the user device for classification” when its scam detection feature is turned on and nothing is “auto-reported to WhatsApp, Meta, or anyone else.” Users can also turn off Scam Alert at any time.