Meta’s messaging platform, WhatsApp, has a new safety feature that offer users key information about those reaching out to them who are not in their contact list.
The ‘Safety Overview’ tool was launched by the messaging group as part of its efforts to crack down on scammers and frauds, said a statement.
The feature alerts a user when someone not in their contacts adds them to a new WhatsApp group that they may not recognise, offering more information about the said group without having to look at the chat.
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“From there, you may choose to exit the group without ever having to look at the chat, and if you think you might recognise the group after seeing the safety overview, you can also choose to see the chat for more context,” said the statement by the company.
What’s more, notifications from the group will also be silenced until the user marks that they wish to stay in it.
The safety overview will also dish out tips to stay safe, said the platform’s officials, while adding that the company is exploring new ways to help users make informed decisions by cautioning them when they start a chat with someone who is not in their contacts by showing more context about the person they are messaging.
WhatsApp also informed that its security teams had detected and banned over 6.8 million scam centres-linked accounts in the first six months of 2025.
More recently, WhatsApp, Meta and OpenAI had disrupted scamsters' efforts that had links to a criminal scam centre in Cambodia.
“Based on our investigative insights into the latest enforcement efforts, we proactively detected and took down accounts before scam centres were able to operationalise them. These centres are operated by organised crime gangs primarily in South East Asia and employed forced labour,” it said.
These attempts ranged from offering payments for fake likes to enlisting others into a rent-a-scooter pyramid scheme, or luring people to invest in cryptocurrency.
"As OpenAI reported, the scammers used ChatGPT to generate the initial text message containing a link to a WhatsApp chat, and then quickly directed the target to Telegram where they were assigned a task of liking videos on TikTok. The scammers attempted to build trust in their scheme by sharing how much the target has already 'earned' in theory, before asking them to deposit money into a crypto account as the next task," it said.
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