WhatsApp’s Scam Alert has moved from an announcement into something you can actually switch on. The toggle is appearing for Android testers on beta build 2.26.34.1, according to WABetaInfo, which found it sitting inside the app’s account settings. Meta described Scam Alert as a limited beta when it published its technical overview on 12 August, without saying who had it; this is the first time the control has been pinned to a specific shipping build.
Where the WhatsApp Scam Alert toggle lives
Scam Alert is off until you turn it on, so nothing changes on your phone if you ignore it. On the builds WABetaInfo looked at, the control sits on the account screen — Settings, then Account — alongside the app’s other privacy and security switches. Enabling it lets WhatsApp check messages from people who are not in your contacts, on the device, against patterns it associates with scams, and put a warning in the chat when something matches. The sender is not told that a warning appeared.
You need to be enrolled in WhatsApp’s Android beta programme through the Play Store to see it at all, and even then WABetaInfo describes it as reaching only some testers so far, with more accounts to follow. There is still no date for general availability, and no market-by-market schedule has surfaced.
What to do when a warning appears
- Read the message before acting. The warning is a probability judgement from a model, not a verdict. A first message from a delivery service or a bank can trip it.
- If it is a scam, block and report. That is the option WhatsApp puts in front of you, and reporting is what keeps feeding the system that produced the flag.
- If it is a false alarm, mark the chat as trusted. The warning goes away and that conversation stops being flagged.
- Read the prompt that follows the trusted tap. This is the part worth slowing down for.
The five-message prompt is the bit to watch
Tell WhatsApp a warning was wrong and it offers to send the last five messages from that conversation to WhatsApp to improve the model. It is optional and it is a separate tap, but it is attached to the button people will use most often. We went through why that placement matters in our earlier piece on how Scam Alert works; the short version is that this second screen, not the toggle, is the real consent moment.
What a beta is for is finding out how often the model is wrong, and that is the number to watch over the next few builds. WABetaInfo’s account gives no false-positive rate, no general-availability date and no list of markets, and the feature stays off unless you go and switch it on — so for now the sensible position for most people is to leave it alone and wait for the wider rollout, unless you are already running the beta and get enough messages from strangers to be a useful tester.
Source: WABetaInfo
