Phishing attempts are a daily occurrence. This is because they are one of the easiest ways for people to extort money or steal your personal data discreetly. These attempts appear as apparently genuine communications from banks and other companies. While email services have matured enough to automatically detect and block most phishing attempts, the burden of detecting and preventing fraud attempts remains with the user with most modern instant messaging applications. WhatsApp may not be at the forefront of the war against these threats, but a new feature guarantees spam protection on the lock screen.
WhatsApp gains greater protection against spam on the lock screen
WhatsApp is very popular in many parts of the world. Since accounts are linked to phone numbers, anyone with your number can contact you through the app. This facilitates direct contact by people with bad intentions. However, WhatsApp displays warning alerts right below the sender’s contact information. This is when you receive messages from unknown numbers. You’ll also see a prominent Block button next to the Add to Contacts button for those conversations, but you’ll have to open the conversation to tap the message or, at the very least, block the sender from your conversation list.
Recently, WhatsApp sent a message to users through its official handle. So it announced a new feature in which you can block messages from an unknown contact directly from the lock screen. In a quick video, the company explained that if a message has all the hallmarks of phishing attempts or other scams, you can expand the quick actions on your lock screen and click the Block option, right next to the Reply button.
Secondary message
WhatsApp may display a secondary message to report the contact. To do this, simply tap the Report Contact checkbox and then press Block to confirm your action in the pop-up window. The sender’s last five messages will be shared with WhatsApp, and we hope that all the data provided by the user will pave the way for an intelligent and automatic spam prevention system. Since this contact blocking system is available on your lock screen, it is also available in your notification shade. In any case, it saves you the effort of opening the app and then the chat, just to block unwanted messages.
The functionality is being widely implemented and should now be available on your device.