Deploying AI tools to reduce international scam calls by 50%: WhatsApp

Meta-owned WhatsApp said Thursday that it has enhanced its AI & ML systems to reduce international scam calls by at least 50 percent. This came in response to the government’s call to issue a notice to the platform in this regard.

Rajiv Chandrasekhar, Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology earlier in the day said that the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology may send a notice to WhatsApp about user harm caused by international scam calls.

Indian WhatsApp users have seen increasing spam calls from international numbers over the past few days. The majority of these spam calls have country codes originating in countries like Vietnam, Malaysia, Kenya, Ethiopia, and Indonesia.

“The platforms are responsible for ensuring the safety and trust of their users. In the case of international scam calls, the main issue we look at is how these numbers get (to the scammers) and how they can identify numbers that are on WhatsApp. If they have a database, we would need to Asking the platforms to consider the possible breach of privacy,” he said, adding that the ministry may issue a notice to the broker in accordance with the laws of India.

WhatsApp responded to the minister’s comments in a statement saying that protecting users’ privacy and security is fundamental to Meta and WhatsApp.

“We continue to introduce several safety tools within WhatsApp such as Block & Report, continually build user safety education and awareness, as well as proactively exclude bad actors from our platform. However, bad actors find various ways to deceive users. International scam calls is a new method Bad actors have recently adopted it.By giving a missed call, they lead nosy users to call or message back only to be scammed,” said a WhatsApp spokesperson.

The spokesperson also said: “We have rapidly enhanced our AI and machine learning systems to significantly reduce such incidents. Our new application will reduce the current contact rate by at least 50 percent and we expect to be able to control the current occurrence effectively. We will continue to work tirelessly In order to ensure a safe experience for our users.

WhatsApp also recently came to the center of a debate over an alleged privacy breach after a Twitter engineer claimed that the messaging app accessed his smartphone’s microphone when it was not in use. The end-to-end encrypted messaging app is estimated to have around 500 million users in India.