In order to be able to take better action against spam bots on WhatsApp, Meta wants to introduce a new feature in the future. This is intended to help expose spam accounts and prevent them from spamming you with fraudulent messages.
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According to the consumer advice center, around 86 percent of all Germans used the WhatsApp messenger service last year. However, Metas WhatsApp chats are only end-to-end encrypted, which can make it an easy target for all kinds of hacker attacks. This also makes WhatsApp vulnerable to scammers and their spam bots, who try to get your data or money through a variety of annoying messages. According to Wabetainfo, WhatsApp now wants to take action against this problem. One measure is currently in beta version.
In the future, the messenger should automatically recognize that certain chats are fraudulent accounts. Apparently the messenger app is supposed to analyze in the background whether the account starts a noticeable number of chats, often sends the same messages to different people or whether the chat messages are even scripted. Once the fraudulent account is exposed, it will be blocked and no new chats can be started. However, these accounts can still send messages in existing chats, so they are not completely excluded from communication.
Blocking is also possible for real users
If users are incorrectly recognized by the new system, not all chats will be lost immediately. However, they then have to contact support in order to have WhatsApp reactivate them through a more detailed check. However, it is not yet known how long these restrictions will apply.
Spam bot detection is currently still in the development phase. It is therefore not yet clear when the new feature will be available for the messenger. Especially with such automatic account restrictions, WhatsApp will probably carry out extensive tests before the system is implemented for all users.