WhatsApp is starting to warn you when a message looks like a scam

A message arrives from a number you don't know. It's friendly, a little too friendly, and within three replies there's an investment opportunity in it. WhatsApp is now testing a feature that says out loud what you were already half thinking. Meta began a limited beta of Scam Alert on August 12, starting with researchers in its bug bounty community before any wider release.

It works by running a machine-learning model on your phone rather than on Meta's servers. The model looks at messages from people who aren't in your contacts, checking the wording and the shape of the conversation against patterns learned from scams other people have reported. When something matches, a warning banner appears in the chat and you choose what happens next: block, report, carry on regardless, or mark the sender as trusted so the alerts stop. The sender is never told they were flagged. Meta's technical write-up is blunt about the privacy side - "No message content leaves the device for classification or is auto-reported to WhatsApp, Meta, or anyone else."

That design matters, because the standard objection to scam detection in an encrypted app has always been that somebody has to read your messages to do it. Doing the work on the handset sidesteps that.

There's a real gap, though, and it's worth knowing before you rely on the banner: Scam Alert only examines messages from non-contacts. The WhatsApp scams that succeed most often arrive from a friend's hijacked account - the "vote for my friend" trick we covered earlier this month - and those come from a genuine contact, so nothing will be flagged. Turning on two-step verification in WhatsApp's settings, and never linking a device or scanning a login QR code you didn't start yourself, still protects you more than any label.

Scammers who message you out of nowhere usually got your number from a leak somewhere. Tendvane's Privacy & accounts check tells you which of your logins have turned up in known breaches, so you can see how much of you is already out there.