WhatsApp, the favored smartphone messaging service, says it is cracking down on hundreds of thousands of accounts linked to rip-off networks and offering customers new instruments to alert them once they could be focused.

In a post on Tuesday, the Meta-owned service says it took down greater than 6.8 million accounts linked to rip-off networks based totally in Southeast Asia. WhatsApp stated that a lot of them are pushed by cryptocurrency investment scams and pyramid schemes, and that some use ChatGPT to generate textual content and hyperlinks that will ship customers to different apps.

WhatsApp says that for customers, it is including new safeguards to group messaging and particular person messages that may warn customers when somebody who’s not of their contacts listing tries to provoke a chat or add them to a bunch messaging thread.

Total, the service is advising that customers take extra time to contemplate responding to a chat request and to confirm whether or not somebody making an attempt to contact them is who they are saying they’re. Utilizing a secondary type of communication is a technique to try this, WhatsApp says: “In the event that they messaged you on WhatsApp, name them on their telephone – or in the event that they despatched you an SMS, give them a WhatsApp name utilizing the telephone quantity you recognize is theirs.”

WhatsApp is the world’s most widely used encrypted messaging app.