Meta Expands AI Anti-Scam Protections Across Facebook, Messenger, and WhatsApp

Meta originally published its new anti-scam announcement on March 11, 2026 at 4:00AM PT and updated it on March 16, 2026 at 7:35AM PT. The company said it is launching new protections across Facebook, Messenger, and WhatsApp while also expanding work with law enforcement and industry peers. Unlike a narrow product update, the post combines new safety UX, AI detection systems, and enforcement statistics to show the scale of the scam problem across Meta’s apps.

According to Meta, it removed over 159 million scam ads in 2025 and took down 10.9 million Facebook and Instagram accounts associated with criminal scam centers. The company also said a recent joint disruption operation disabled over 150,000 accounts tied to scam center networks and contributed to 21 arrests by the Royal Thai Police. Those figures make clear that the campaign is aimed at industrialized fraud operations, not just isolated spam incidents.

New Tools Meta Highlighted

Suspicious friend-request alerts on Facebook.

Device-linking warnings on WhatsApp when behavior suggests a scam attempt.

Expanded advanced scam detection on Messenger in more countries.

Broader AI analysis of text, images, context, deceptive links, and domain impersonation patterns.

Meta also said advertiser verification should cover 90% of its ad revenue by the end of 2026, up from 70% today. That is important because scam prevention is not only a content-moderation problem; it is also an identity and payments problem. By tying ad verification, messaging warnings, and backend detection together, Meta is signaling that anti-fraud defenses have to work across ad buying, account behavior, and private communication surfaces at the same time.

The March 16 update adds an industry dimension. Meta said it signed the Industry Accord Against Online Scams and Fraud with 11 partners including Adobe, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and others at the UNODC Global Fraud Summit in Vienna. The practical takeaway is that platform companies increasingly see scam prevention as a cross-service coordination issue. Meta’s own rollout will be judged by false-positive rates and user trust, but the announcement shows that scam defense is becoming a major AI-and-safety battleground for consumer platforms.