Meta rolls out new scam detection across WhatsApp, Messenger, and Facebook

The company removed 159 million scam ads last year and took down 10.9 million accounts linked to criminal networks. Now it wants to catch scammers before they get to you.

Meta has announced a fresh wave of anti-scam tools across its platforms, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Facebook, as it steps up both on-platform detection and cooperation with law enforcement in Southeast Asia and beyond.

The centrepiece of the announcement is a new Facebook feature, currently in testing, that flags suspicious friend or follow requests before users act on them. When a request arrives from an account with no mutual connections, a different country location, or a suspiciously recent join date, Facebook will display a warning.

The same alert will appear when users send requests to similarly flagged accounts. The feature is designed to interrupt one of the most common social engineering pipelines: fake profiles that accumulate mutual friends over time to lend themselves a veneer of legitimacy, then pivot to scam messages through Messenger.

WhatsApp is also getting a new layer of protection targeting a specific and growing attack vector: device linking fraud. Scammers have been tricking users into scanning malicious QR codes, sometimes under the pretence of a customer service call or technical support request, which links the scammer’s device to the victim’s WhatsApp account.

The app will now display a warning when it detects a suspicious device linking request and show the user where the request originated.

For Messenger, Meta says it is expanding its existing scam detection feature to more countries this month. The system works in two stages. First, on-device analysis automatically flags messages from unfamiliar contacts that match the patterns of common scams, fraudulent job offers, fake investment pitches, work-from-home schemes.

If flagged, the user is warned and given the option to send the conversation to Meta’s AI for a cloud-based second review. That opt-in step breaks the message’s end-to-end encryption, which Meta discloses; users who prefer not to submit can still act on the on-device warning alone.

The detection feature can be accessed and toggled in Settings > Privacy & Safety Settings > Scam Detection.

Alongside the platform-level tools, Meta is accelerating a broader advertiser verification push. The company says it wants verified advertisers to account for 90% of its ad revenue by the end of 2026, up from 70% at present.

The remaining 10% would be reserved for low-risk advertisers such as small local businesses, which Meta gives as an example of a category it deems exempt from the high-risk verification requirement.

The announcement comes with a significant set of enforcement numbers. Meta says it removed more than 159 million scam ads last year and took down 10.9 million Facebook and Instagram accounts associated with criminal scam operations.

It also disclosed the outcome of a recent joint operation with the Royal Thai Police, which resulted in 21 arrests and Meta disabling more than 150,000 accounts linked to scam centre networks.

This was the second such “Joint Disruption Week,” according to Axios, the first, in December, had seen Meta remove 59,000 accounts and pages; the second expanded the coalition to include the UK, Canada, South Korea, Japan, Singapore, the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, and Indonesia.

Meta also confirmed a partnership with the US Department of State to launch the ‘Trapped in Scam Crime’ awareness campaign in Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and several other countries.

The campaign targets the supply side of the problem: the trafficked workers who are themselves coerced into staffing scam centres, often lured with fake job offers before being held against their will in compounds primarily based in Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos.

The moves come as Meta faces intensifying scrutiny over scam advertising more broadly. A Reuters investigation in late 2025 reported that internal Meta documents showed the company earned an estimated $7 billion annually from ads linked to scams and prohibited goods, and showed users roughly 15 billion higher-risk ads per day on average.

Meta has disputed some of the Reuters framing; the current announcement is the latest in a series of enforcement updates the company has made public in the months since.