Meta-owned popular messaging platform WhatsApp on Thursday said that it has taken stern action on the growing menace of International scam calls in India after the government took notice of the issue and declared to send a notice to the platform.
The platform, which has over 500 million users in the country, said it has deployed more robust artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) systems to curtail such incidents. “Our new enforcement will reduce the current calling rate by at least 50 percent and we expect to be able to control the current problen effectively. We will continue to work relentlessly towards ensuring a safe experience for our users,” a company spokesperson said in a statement.
Earlier in the day, Minister of State for Electronics and IT, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, had said that the IT Ministry will send a notice to WhatsApp on the issue of spam calls from unknown international numbers. He stressed that social media platforms are responsible for safeguarding the security and trust of users. These spam calls with international numbers, mostly from African and Southeast Asian countries, along with fake messages from unknown users, have flooded WhatsApp users in India. 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.