WhatsApp Begins Limited Beta Testing of On-Device Scam Alert to Detect Fraud While Preserving End-to-End Encryption
WhatsApp has started limited beta testing of its Scam Alert feature, which uses an on-device machine learning model to analyze message patterns and linguistic indicators of fraud. The system runs entirely locally on the user's smartphone, ensuring that conversation content is never sent to WhatsApp or Meta. Users receive warnings about suspicious messages from unknown contacts and can choose to block, report, ignore, or mark the chat as trusted. To maintain transparency, each model release is logged in an immutable journal managed by Cloudflare with Ed25519 signatures and SHA-256 hashes. The company receives only anonymized statistics on detections and user actions. In parallel, Signal has introduced automatic key verification using a cryptographically verifiable log audited by Cloudflare and Trail of Bits.
AntiMalwareAug 12, 2026Translated from Russian