Phishing and spam attempts are the order of the day and if until now we received them through emails or SMS, it was a matter of time before they reached WhatsApp, the most mainstream messaging app. Fortunately, WhatsApp is taking measures and if months ago it implemented a system to rid us of spam calls, now it wants nip spam messages in the bud.
In recent months we have seen scam attempts of all kinds: the mythical one of the son who writes to us asking for money for an emergency, the one who claims to be someone from human resources who offers you an incredibly well-paid job, supposed email messages with a hypothetical package that they have to deliver to us, the one from the bank… yes, WhatsApp is already a minefield of scams. Faced with this barrage of scams, the new WhatsApp feature to block spam from the home screen.
Avoid falling into the trap from the lock screen
At the end of the day, the fact that WhatsApp can be used to talk to our friend as well as to the carpenter or even the insurance company has a double meaning: maximum usefulness and a gateway to potential scams. When someone unknown uses our phone number to contact us via WhatsApp, the first thing that appears is the possibility of block, next to ‘Add’ the contact to our calendar.
But WhatsApp has gone further by streamlining the process with that blocking option directly from the lock screen. As? As they detail on Android Police, If a message from a stranger follows the pattern of a phishing or scam attemptyou can block it directly once the WhatsApp notification appears inviting you to respond, since you will have the option to block right next to it.
Come on, it won’t even be necessary to open neither the application nor much less that chat. In this way the procedure is much faster, we avoid falling into the temptation of responding by reading more messages and the attacker seeing us online.
This is a function announced by WhatsApp globallyso it is a matter of time before it reaches all compatible phones through an update
Cover | Xataka and Spam404, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
In Xataka Mobile | How to recognize spam WhatsApp messages and what you can do to avoid them
