Union Minister for Electronics and IT Ashwini Vaishnaw has said that Meta-owned WhatsApp has agreed to disable a WhatsApp account from its messaging platform if that number is found to be a fraudulent connection. This comes amid the government's cognisance of the growing number of international spam calls in India and an announcement to send a notice to the platform.
“We have actively engaged with WhatsApp and they have agreed that yes, customer safety is most important, and they are absolutely on board to deregister the users which have been detected as fraud users," Vaishnaw was quoted as saying while replying to a query on the steps taken by the government to stop pesky calls from international numbers on WhatsApp that have seen a massive surge in the past few weeks.
The Union minister was speaking at the launch of a customer-facing sectoral reform. The centre is also in talks with other messaging services, such as Telegram to remove fraudulent users.
Last week, Minister of State for IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar said that his ministry will send a notice to WhatsApp on the issue of spam calls from unknown international numbers. Many Whatsapp users in the country have complained on social media that a major chunk of these spam calls had country codes belonging to Indonesia (+62), Vietnam (+84), Malaysia (+60), Kenya (+254), and Ethiopia (+251).
However, reacting to a growing number of pesky calls from international numbers in India, WhatsApp, the world's most popular messaging platform also last week announced it has implemented new artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) systems that will reduce such calls by at least 50 per cent.
"We continue to provide several safety tools within WhatsApp like Block & 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. International scam calls are a new way that bad actors have recently adopted. By giving a missed call, they lead curious users to call or message back only to get scammed," a WhatsApp spokesperson had told ABP Live in a statement.
It is being said that scammers are tapping end-to-end encrypted messaging platforms, including Telegram and the world's most popular messaging platform WhatsApp to carry out these scams.
It is highly advisable not to respond to such unwanted calls because this is part of a major scam where fraudsters would lure in unsuspecting users with promises of quick money and then swindle them out of lakhs.