WhatsApp Curbs International Spam Calls In India After Warning From Centre

The spam calls showed country codes of Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Ethiopia, among others. Most of these calls started with +251 (Ethiopia), +62 (Indonesia), +254 (Kenya), +84 (Vietnam), and other countries.

New Delhi: Meta-owned WhatsApp on Thursday said it has taken stern action on the growing menace of International scam calls in India, after the government took cognisance of the issue and announced to send a notice to the platform over the issue. The messaging platform said it has ramped up its artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) systems to bring down such incidents significantly. As per a Statista report, there are over 487 million WhatsApp users in India, making it the biggest market for the company.

“Our new enforcement will reduce the current calling rate by at least 50 per cent and we expect to be able to control the current incidence effectively. We will continue to work relentlessly towards ensuring a safe experience for our users,” a company spokesperson said in a statement, IANS reported.

Earlier today, 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 the safety and trust of users.

Jamtara Global? Indian WhatsApp Users Flooded With Spam Calls

Millions of WhatsApp users in India have been perplexed by the volume of international spam calls they have received in recent days, putting many at risk of financial loss. These spam calls with international numbers, mostly from African and Southeast Asian countries, as well as fake messages from unknown users, have flooded WhatsApp, leaving Indians with no choice but to share their ordeal on Twitter. The spam calls showed country codes of Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Ethiopia, among others. Most of these calls started with +251 (Ethiopia), +62 (Indonesia), +254 (Kenya), +84 (Vietnam), and other countries.

WhatsApp said that international scam calls are a new way that bad actors have recently adopted. By leaving a missed call, they entice users to call or text back, only to be scammed. “We continue to provide several safety tools within WhatsApp like Block and Report, consistently build user safety education and awareness, as well as, proactively weed out bad-actors from our platform. However, bad actors find different ways to scam users,” the company spokesperson noted.

(With Inputs From IANS)