Text message scams and spam are a problem that requires more than one solution. Google has not announced once or twice, but five solutions to stop spam and scams which reach us by SMS in the home app, Google Messages.
Google comments on its blog that it blocks 2 billion malicious messages every month. For Cybersecurity Awareness Month in October, Google shared with us the changes that will protect your email app from spam and messagesso the number of blocked messages is even higher.
Google Messages, proof of spam and scam
Scammers love SMS because it is a universal way to reach every part of the world and they have the right tools to shoot at will with all kinds of scamsfrom fake job offers to notices of fines or messages impersonating your bank. The Google Messages app, which comes preinstalled on most Android phones, stops many of these scams, but not all.
This Fraud protection goes up a notch with five new features that, when available, should significantly reduce the number of malicious messages of this type reaching us via SMS. Here is the news:
- Better scam detection. Google Messages now enables advanced protection, with on-device machine learning, against two specific types of fraud: fake job offers and fraudulent messages with the premise of sending a package. These messages, when detected as fraudulent, will go directly to the spam folder.
- Malicious link alerts. Google Messages will warn us before opening a link that comes to us from an unknown sender and will block links from senders it considers suspicious. This new feature is being tested in a handful of countries and will “soon” extend to the entire world.
- Block international messages. A new feature that will please many is the ability to block messages from senders with a prefix from another country, unless they are in your contact list. This will be optional and if you have it enabled, international messages from strangers will go straight to the spam folder. This protection will debut as a pilot project in Singapore before the end of the year and, if the results are good, we can expect it to be applied globally later.
- Protection against “naked”. Google Messages has a setting to prevent content such as unwanted nudity. This will be optional and if we enable it, photos containing nudity will be blurred until we decide to view them and warnings about possible implications before transmitting this type of content. Detection of these types of messages is done on the device and will reach all phones with Android 9.0 and above in the coming months.
- Contacts verified. Finally, Google Messages will make it easier for us to verify that we are chatting with who we think we are chatting with. To do this, we can check the public keys of our contacts, using a QR code or code comparison, on mobile phones with Android 9.0 or higher. The feature won’t arrive until 2025.
Among the five changes announced, the only one starting to activate today is protection against job scams and package tracking, however, making its debut in the beta version of Google Messages.
Cover image | Generated with AI
More information | Google
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