WhatsApp launches automatic blocking of phone spam

Posted On: May 12, 2023

KOMPAS.com – WhatsApp has launched a new feature to solve the problem of unwanted calls. The addition of this feature is on the back-end side or the WhatsApp system itself, not on the user’s device side, and has just been released in India.

Because lately there have been many complaints on social media from WhatsApp users in India, who have experienced cases of calls (voice calls) from unknown numbers using international numbers, which are reported as unwanted calls.

The massive case prompted the Indian government to intervene. From the reports found, some users have been harassed and even experienced financial fraud. Most of them offer fake job offers.

The criminals also allegedly asked users to connect their WhatsApp account to other messaging apps, such as Telegram.

Fraudsters like the one above use international code numbers from Ethiopia (+251), Indonesia (+62), Kenya (+254), Malaysia (+60) and Vietnam (+84) .

India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, said his party would send a report to Meta to curb spam calls encountered by Indian citizens.

Foreign calls with international numbers should be restricted immediately. According to Chandrasekhar, the spam issue that arose should be an issue that has been addressed and investigated by WhatsApp itself.

WhatsApp itself claims to have reduced spam calls by 50% in its ecosystem.

“International scam calls are a new means adopted by criminals. We hope to effectively control this incident. We will continue to work to keep our users safe,” a WhatsApp spokesperson said.

According to WhatsApp, the effort that users can make so far is to take advantage of blocking and reporting features when receiving foreign calls. WhatsApp will attempt to get rid of bad actors on the platform.

“We will continue to provide safety tools on WhatsApp such as Block and Report (features), systematically strengthen user education and awareness, and weed out bad actors on our platform,” WhatsApp said.

It is not yet known if the auto block spam feature on WhatsApp will be released outside India including Indonesia as well or not.

As quoted by Tech Crunch’s KompasTekno on Friday (12/5/2023), India is the country with the most WhatsApp users at 500 million users. However, the problem faced recently by Indian users is not the first.

The reason is that last year, a number of Indian users received spam emails from WhatsApp. Even though they have blocked and reported the number, they often receive another spam message from a different number.

Apart from WhatsApp, Google also reportedly experienced a similar case. Some business accounts are abusing the Google RCS (Rich Communication Services) ad spam policy to send promotional messages to Indian users.

As a result, as many users have complained about, Google has also stopped the RCS advertising service in India.

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