Meta took down 6.8 million WhatsApp accounts tied to scam operations on Tuesday after victims reported financial fraud schemes.
The company said many of the scam sources were based in Southeast Asia at criminal scam centers.
“Based on our investigative insights into the latest enforcement efforts, we proactively detected and took down accounts before scam centers were able to operationalize them,” Meta said in a Tuesday release.
“These scam centers typically run many scam campaigns at once — from cryptocurrency investments to pyramid schemes. There is always a catch and it should be a red flag for everyone: you have to pay upfront to get promised returns or earnings,” they wrote.
In an effort to ensure users are protected, the company said it would flag when people were added to group messages by someone who isn’t in their contact list and urge individuals to pause before engaging with unfamiliar messages where they’re encouraged to communicate on other social platforms.
“Scams may start with a text message or on a dating app, then move to social media, private messaging apps and ultimately payment or crypto platforms,” Meta said.
“In the course of just one scam, they often try to cycle people through many different platforms to ensure that any one service has only a limited view into the entire scam, making it more challenging to detect,” the company added.
The Tuesday release highlighted an incident with Cambodian users urging people to enlist in a rent a scooter pyramid scheme with an initial text message generated by ChatGPT.
The message contained a link to a WhatsApp chat which redirected the target to Telegram where they were told to like TikTok videos.
“We banned ChatGPT accounts that were generating short recruitment-style messages in English, Spanish, Swahili, Kinyarwanda, German, and Haitian Creole. These messages offered recipients high salaries for trivial tasks — such as liking social media posts — and encouraged them to recruit others,” OpenAI wrote in their June report focused on disrupting malicious artificial intelligence efforts.
“The operation appeared highly centralized and likely originated from Cambodia. Using AI-powered translation tools, we were able to investigate and disrupt the campaign’s use of OpenAI services swiftly,” the company added.
The Federal Trade Commission has reported a steady increase in social media fraud. The agency said more money was reported lost to fraud originating on social media than any other method of contact from January 2021 to June 2023 — with losses totaling $2.7 billion.
