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 ...