SAN FRANCISCO: Meta on Tuesday said it shut nearly seven million WhatsApp accounts linked to scammers in the first half of this year and is ramping up safeguards against such schemes.

“Our team identified the accounts and disabled them before the criminal organizations that created them could use them,” WhatsApp external affairs director Clair Deevy said. Often run by organised gangs, the scams range from bogus cryptocurrency investments to get-rich-quick pyramid schemes, WhatsApp executives said in a briefing.

“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,” Meta-owned WhatsApp said in a blog post.

WhatsApp detected and banned more than 6.8 million accounts linked to scam centers, most of them in Southeast Asia, according to Meta.

Published in Dawn, August 7th, 2025