Your New Facebook Friend Request Will Now Come With A Warning

Meta has announced a new wave of anti-scam warning features across WhatsApp, Messenger, and Facebook, combining on-platform detection tools with expanded cooperation with law enforcement agencies in Southeast Asia and beyond.

The headline feature is a new warning system on Facebook, currently being tested, that flags suspicious friend or follow requests before users act on them. When a request arrives from an account with no mutual connections, a different country location, or a suspiciously recent creation date, Facebook will display an alert. The same warning appears when users send requests to similarly flagged accounts. The feature targets one of the most common social engineering pipelines: fake profiles that build up mutual friends over time to appear legitimate before pivoting to scam messages through Messenger.

WhatsApp is receiving a separate layer of protection against device-linking fraud, a growing attack vector in which scammers trick users into scanning malicious QR codes, often under the guise of customer support or technical assistance, which links the scammer’s device to the victim’s WhatsApp account. The app will now show a warning when it detects a suspicious device-linking request and display where the request originated.

For Messenger, Meta is expanding its existing scam detection system to more countries this month. The system works in two stages: first, on-device analysis automatically flags messages from unfamiliar contacts that match patterns of common scams such as fraudulent job offers, fake investment pitches, and work-from-home schemes. If flagged, the user is warned and given the option to send the conversation to Meta’s AI for a cloud-based second review. That step breaks the message’s end-to-end encryption, which Meta discloses upfront; users who prefer not to submit can still act on the on-device warning alone.

Alongside the platform tools, Meta is accelerating an advertiser verification push, aiming for verified advertisers to account for 90% of its ad revenue by the end of 2026, up from 70% currently. The remaining 10% would be reserved for low-risk categories such as small local businesses.

Meta says it removed more than 159 million scam ads last year and took down 10.9 million Facebook and Instagram accounts associated with criminal scam operations. It also disclosed the results of a recent joint operation with the Royal Thai Police, which led to 21 arrests and Meta disabling more than 150,000 accounts linked to scam center networks.

This was the second such “Joint Disruption Week”: the first, in December, resulted in the removal of 59,000 accounts and pages, and the coalition has since expanded to include the UK, Canada, South Korea, Japan, Singapore, the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, and Indonesia.

Meta has also partnered with the US Department of State to launch the “Trapped in Scam Crime” awareness campaign across Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and several other countries. The campaign targets the supply side of the problem by focusing on trafficked workers whom criminal networks coerce into staffing scam centers after luring them with fake job offers. The groups often hold these workers against their will in compounds located primarily in Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos.

The moves come amid intensifying scrutiny over scam advertising on Meta’s platforms. TechJuice earlier reported an investigation in late 2025 that showed internal Meta documents pointed to the company earning an estimated $7 billion annually from ads linked to scams and prohibited goods, with users exposed to roughly 15 billion higher-risk ads per day on average.

Meta has disputed elements of that reporting, and the current announcement is the latest in a series of public enforcement updates the company has made in the months since.

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