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Meta, the parent company of WhatsApp, has revealed it shut down 6.8 million accounts in the first half of 2025, all of which were connected to international scam networks preying on users across multiple platforms.
This sweeping action was part of Meta’s broader strategy to clamp down on digital fraud. In a statement released Tuesday, the company highlighted new security features on WhatsApp, including a Safety Overview notification when users are added to a group by someone outside their contacts, and ongoing experiments with cautionary alerts encouraging users to pause before interacting with suspicious messages.
As online scams become more widespread and deceptive — often involving fake offers, phishing links, and social engineering — Meta emphasized that criminal scam centers are among the most active sources of such threats. These operations, frequently driven by organized crime and forced labor, run scams across multiple channels to avoid detection.
Scam campaigns typically span platforms: a fraudulent scheme might begin through SMS or a dating app, shift to messaging services or social media, and ultimately aim to extract payments via cryptocurrency or other digital transactions.
Meta says recent schemes have exploited not only WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram, but also Telegram, TikTok, and even AI-generated messages using ChatGPT to spread false offers — such as paid likes, pyramid scheme recruitment, or fake investment opportunities.
The company traced these campaigns to a criminal scam hub in Cambodia and reported that the disruption was achieved in collaboration with OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT.
