WhatsApp is adding another feature designed to protect you from group chat scams. Now, when someone you might not know invites you to a group chat, the app will display a new “safety overview” that appears before you can even see the messages.
The overview will include information about the group, including when it was created, who invited you, and how many members it has. It will also include a warning to watch out for scams, as well as information on how to limit who can invite you to group chats on WhatsApp. Once you’ve viewed this page, you can choose to exit the group without even looking at the chat or view the chat for more information.
The feature builds upon the “context card” that WhatsApp rolled out last year, which shows key information about a group. While context cards will appear for all the groups you’re invited to, WhatsApp’s new safety overviews will appear as an “interstitial” page when someone you might not recognize sends you an invite.
These overviews tie into WhatsApp’s broader initiative to combat scams, which have become increasingly prevalent — 73 percent of adults in the US say they’ve experienced a scam or attack, according to a recent survey from the Pew Research Center.
In June, WhatsApp worked with Meta and OpenAI to take down a criminal scam center in Cambodia, which used ChatGPT to create text messages promising work to people who joined a WhatsApp chat group. After directing people to Telegram, scammers asked them to “like” videos on TikTok as their first task. The bad actors then showed people fake reports about how much money they had “earned” and later asked them to deposit money into a cryptocurrency account as another “task.”
Other forms of the scam involved a rental scooter pyramid scheme and trying to get people to invest in crypto, according to WhatsApp. “By using more platforms, they’re trying to cover their tracks,” Clair Deevy, WhatsApp’s director of external affairs, said in a press briefing. “But it also means that when we are working together, they are exposing themselves to more detection systems and teams across all the platforms at once.”
Along with its new group chat safety feature, WhatsApp is also testing ways to fight scams that involve bad actors contacting you on other platforms before asking you to transfer your conversation to WhatsApp. It is trying out new ways to alert people to “pause” before they start a chat with someone not in their contacts and will show more context about who they’re about to message.
