WhatsApp Steps Up Fight Against Account Impersonation

WhatsApp recently began offering usernames, designed to help people connect while keeping their phone numbers private.

Now, the Meta-owned company said it will allow high-profile names to be claimed only by legitimate owners as it tries to prevent impersonation on the messaging platform, Bloomberg News reported Wednesday (July 1).

The username feature was introduced Monday (June 29), when Meta began letting customers reserve a unique handle for launch later in the year.

“Usernames are our latest step to make WhatsApp even more private. There’s no directory to browse and no suggestions—people will need to know your exact username to contact you for the first time,” the company wrote in its announcement.

According to the Bloomberg report, the move is facing scrutiny from India’s government, which is expected to call on WhatApp to explain the implications of the feature. Meta told Bloomberg it has built several layers of protection against scams into WhatsApp’s usernames offering.

“Other users need to know the exact username to message you, we will limit how many new people an account can contact, block repeated attempts to guess someone’s username key, and have systems to detect and remove activity showing common impersonation and abuse patterns,” the company said.

Bloomberg noted that India represents the largest market for WhatsApp with upwards of 600 million users, meaning any serious government pushback can hinder the global rollout of the username feature.

This is happening at a time when scammers are increasingly using social media channels to target their victims. Findings by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released in April showed that nearly 30% of people who reported losing money in a scam last year say that the scam began on social media.

“Scammers may hack a user’s account, exploit what a user posts to figure out how to target them, or buy ads and use the same tools used by real businesses to target people by age, interests or shopping habits,” the commission said.

The FTC’s data are in line with PYMNTS Intelligence research which showed that digital communication channels are among the most common ways cybercriminals make their first contact with financial scams victims.

Meta introduced a series of artificial intelligence-powered anti-scam tools for WhatsApp, Facebook and Messenger earlier this year.

In the case of WhatApp, that meant a warning system that alerts users of potentially suspicious device-linking requests, aimed at preventing scams where fraudsters try to dupe WhatsApp users into connecting their account to another device.