Last year, the company removed 159 million fraudulent ads and removed 10.9 million accounts linked to criminal networks. Now it wants to catch scammers before they get to you.
Meta has announced a new wave of anti-fraud tools across its WhatsApp, Messenger and Facebook platforms as it strengthens both on-platform detection and cooperation with law enforcement agencies in Southeast Asia and beyond.
The centerpiece of the announcement is a new Facebook feature, currently in testing, that flags a suspicious friend or performs requests before users act on them. Facebook will display a warning when a request comes from an unrelated account, a different country location, or a questionable last login date.
The same warning will appear when users send requests to similarly flagged accounts. The feature is designed to cut off one of the most common social engineering pipelines: fake profiles that collect mutual friends to give themselves legitimacy over time, then turn into scam messages via Messenger.
WhatsApp is also getting a new layer of defense that targets a specific and growing attack vector: phishing. Fraudsters trick users into scanning malicious QR codes that link the fraudster’s device to the victim’s WhatsApp account, sometimes under the pretense of a customer service call or tech support request.
The app will now display an alert when it detects a request connecting to a suspicious device and show the user where the request came from.
Meta for Messenger said it is expanding its existing fraud detection feature to more countries this month. The system works in two stages. First, on-device analysis automatically flags messages from unfamiliar contacts that match patterns of common scams, fake job offers, fake investment offers, and work-from-home schemes.
If flagged, the user is alerted and given the option to send the conversation to Meta’s AI for a cloud-based second review. This join step breaks the end-to-end encryption of the message revealed by Meta; Users who choose not to submit can still act on the device-only alert.
The detection feature can be accessed and changed in Settings > Privacy & Security Settings > Fraud Detection.
Along with platform-level tools, Meta is accelerating a broader advertiser verification push. The company wants verified advertisers to account for 90% of ad revenue by the end of 2026, up from 70% now.
The remaining 10% will be reserved for low-risk advertisers such as small local businesses, which Meta cites as an example of a category it considers exempt from the high-risk verification requirement.
The announcement comes with a significant set of performance numbers. Meta said it removed more than 159 million fraudulent ads last year and removed 10.9 million Facebook and Instagram accounts linked to criminal fraud operations.
It also announced the outcome of a recent joint operation with the Royal Thai Police, which resulted in 21 arrests and the disabling of more than 150,000 accounts linked to Meta’s fraud center networks.
According to Axios, this was the second such “Co-Breach Week”, the first in December saw Meta take down 59,000 accounts and pages; the second expanded the coalition to include the United Kingdom, Canada, South Korea, Japan, Singapore, the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, and Indonesia.
Meta also confirmed a partnership with the US State Department to launch a “Crime Trapped in Fraud” awareness campaign in Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and several other countries.
The campaign targets the supply side of the problem: trafficked workers force themselves into recruitment fraud centers, where they are lured with fake job offers before being held against their will in facilities located mainly in Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos.
The moves come as Meta faces increased scrutiny over fraudulent advertising more broadly. At the end of 2025, a Reuters investigation reported that internal Meta documents showed that the company made about $7 billion annually from ads related to scams and banned goods, and served users an average of about $15 billion more high-risk ads per day.
Meta disputed some of Reuters’ framing; the current announcement is the latest in a series of executive updates the company has made public over the months.
