META has rolled out additional anti-scam protections across WhatsApp, Facebook and Messenger, aiming to thwart impersonation, spoofed brands and other sophisticated fraud tactics. The update uses AI-powered protections to spot attempts at celebrity impersonation and deceptive links, with Facebook and Messenger features designed to flag suspicious friend requests and profiles with few mutual connections or mismatched locations.
It also enables AI review of suspicious chats in Messenger, analysing text, images and contextual signals to identify fraud patterns, including scams that involve legitimate account features such as device linking. The improvements come as part of Meta’s ongoing anti-scam drive, which last year led to the removal of more than 159 million scam ads and the dismantling of 10.9 million accounts on Facebook and Instagram linked to criminal activity.
Malwarebytes notes that users can benefit from similar protections through its Scam Guard tool, which scans messages and links across multiple platforms. Americans lost $13.7 billion to cyber-enabled fraud in 2024, according to the FBI’s April 2025 Internet Crime Report.