Facebook is trying to put the wheels in the hands of scammers who are used to deceive less savvy users and in this perspective, the social network is launching a new feature for the Messenger app that will search for potentially suspicious messages from strangers, with the aims to detect potential scams, impostors and inappropriate messages intended for users under the age of 18.
Facebook Messengerwill pop up a warning pop-up when a person is contacted by someone who may be a fraudster intending to send potentially harmful messages to the user.
Facebook Messenger helps recognize scams
Messenger will warn users to be wary of requests for money when they receive a message from someone they are not already friends with, and the app will also search for messages that come from accounts that may try to impersonate a Facebook friend and warn users that the person they are chatting with could be an impostor, while for minors Facebook will show the warning when they receive a message from an adult they dont know in order to educate them to always be cautious in these cases.
Facebook sometimes struggles to recognize fake profiles, so new messages may help prevent less experienced users from being deceived, however, scammers are increasingly evolving to evade detection.
Detecting malicious behavior by some users has become particularly important for Facebook, as messages will be encrypted by default in the future.
Some security advocates have criticized this plan saying that it will give Facebook less visibility on how the attackers exploit its service, but the social network claims that it has designed this security function to work correctly with full encryption and stresses that it exploits the technology of machine learning that examines the general behavior of users rather than the contents of their messages