New Delhi: Meta-owned WhatsApp on Thursday said it has taken strong action on the growing threat of international scam calls in India after the government announced taking cognizance of the issue and sending a notice to the platform on the issue.
The platform, which has over 500 million users in the country, said it has sharpened its artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) systems to reduce such incidents.
A company spokesperson said, “Our new enforcement will reduce the current calling rate by at least 50 percent and we expect to be able to handle the current incidents more effectively. Will continue to work tirelessly to ensure that.” a statement.
Earlier in the day, Minister of State for Electronics and IT, Rajeev Chandrasekhar said that the IT ministry will send a notice to WhatsApp on the issue of spam calls from unknown international numbers, stressing that social media platforms are responsible for ensuring security and users’ trust.
These spam calls to international numbers, mostly from African and South East Asian countries, along with fake messages from unknown users, flooded WhatsApp users in India.
The spam calls showed country codes for Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia and Ethiopia. Most of these calls originated from +251 (Ethiopia), +62 (Indonesia), +254 (Kenya), +84 (Vietnam) and other countries.
WhatsApp said that international scam calls are a new tactic that bad actors have adopted recently.
By giving missed calls, they trick eager users to call or message back, only to be duped.
“We continue to provide a number of security tools within WhatsApp such as block and report, continually build user security education and awareness, as well as proactively remove bad-actors from our platform. find different ways to deceive the noted a company spokesperson.