WhatsApp is committed to helping people stay safe while protecting the privacy of their messages. As scam tactics evolve — from impersonation to social engineering to AI-generated lures — we’re always evolving as well, so that our protections stay ahead of scammers while protecting people’s personal messages with end-to-end encryption.
Today, we’re sharing an early look at Scam Alert, a new, optional feature that runs an on-device machine learning model to alert a user about potential scam messages. No message content leaves the device for classification or is auto-reported to WhatsApp, Meta, or anyone else. The feature complements end-to-end encryption while enabling a user-controlled, optional scam alert when the model believes there’s a likely scam.
Before we make this feature available to all WhatsApp users, we are publishing this early technical overview alongside the feature’s limited rollout in Beta, and will continue working with our Bug Bounty community to stress-test this system. To help validate our implementation, we welcome feedback from the broader security research community.
Design Principles
Recent advances in on-device machine learning models make it possible to run accurate text classification entirely on mobile hardware without the performance, battery, or model-size tradeoffs that previously made on-device classification less practical. Scam Alert is well-suited to this approach: The model is small enough to run on-device, simple enough to publish for independent review, and effective without server-side components. The architecture we chose reflects a set of deliberate choices about what this system can and cannot do.
