WhatsApp has begun a limited beta rollout of Scam Alert, an optional feature that uses an on-device machine learning model to flag suspicious messages from non-contacts.
The company says the tool is designed to work alongside end-to-end encryption rather than around it, with classification happening entirely on the device and no automatic reporting to WhatsApp or parent company Meta.
Once a user enables the feature, a model is downloaded to the device and evaluates incoming messages for patterns associated with known scams, drawing on conversational structure and linguistic cues.
If a message is flagged, only the recipient sees a warning inside the chat, but the sender is not notified. The user can block the contact, report the message, ignore the warning, or mark the conversation as trusted so future alerts are suppressed. Users who mark a chat as trusted can separately choose to share the last five messages received to help refine the model’s accuracy.
To prevent a scenario where a specific model could be pushed to a specific person, WhatsApp says every model release must be logged on a third-party, append-only transparency ledger before it can be distributed.
