Scammers are opportunistic and use holidays or world events to try to trick people. Ahead of Valentine’s Day and as part of our global anti-scam awareness campaign to protect people online, we’re sharing relevant product tools on Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram, new research into romance scams across the internet and updates on our enforcements against scammers masquerading as military personnel and others.
What Are Romance Scams?
Romance scams are a common scheme in which scammers target people in a variety of ways – malicious texts or emails, dating apps, social media posts, discussion forums and more – under romantic pretenses. In these cases, scammers would typically pose as attractive, single and successful individuals, often with a military or business background. They would send cold messages to many targets at once – in a typical spray and pray scheme – to initiate contact. If a target were to respond, the scammer would try to build trust over a period of time, ultimately asking for money or suggesting a fraudulent investment opportunity.
Anti-Scam Tips Ahead of Valentine’s Day
Here are some tips on how to spot romance scams and stay safe:
Our Latest Anti-Scam Tools
Here are the anti-scam tools we’ve built to help users stay safe.
Across our apps, we remove accounts that our automated systems find to be malicious, including those that impersonate others. But because bad actors may not immediately use accounts maliciously, we also show you warnings – encouraging you to pause and exercise caution – if we detect suspicious signals, in addition to applying restrictions to suspicious accounts.
On Facebook Messenger, we rolled out Safety Notices to caution you when you’re chatting with someone whose account shows signals of suspicious activity, and who may be based in a different country. We are testing similar nudges to teens on Instagram and will begin expanding them to more users in the coming months.
On WhatsApp, people can silence calls from unknown callers to prevent unwanted contact, including from potential scammers.
Working With Others to Protect People From Scams
Scammers constantly evolve their tactics to evade detection and rarely, if ever, target one single platform. They do so to ensure that any one company can only see a small piece of these scam campaigns. This makes collaboration with law enforcement and within industries, including the financial services industry, even more critical in our anti-scam efforts.
We’ve recently joined Safer Internet India coalition, a collaborative effort bringing together leading digital service providers, telecom companies, fintech players, and civil society organisations to address emerging online challenges and promote user safety to create a safer, more inclusive internet ecosystem in India.
“Online scams and fraudulent activity are serious issues especially as more and more people come online. Combatting this requires concrete and cooperative measures across the ecosystem led by the industry. The Safer Internet India coalition is a crucial step in fostering cross-industry collaboration to protect Indians from emerging online threats and extends Meta’s goal of actively working with our peers to discuss the latest trends and strategies to prevent, detect and respond to criminal scammers. We’re confident that this initiative will help multiply our collective anti-scam efforts, including driving user awareness and promoting safer digital practices while ensuring that innovation remains responsible and inclusive.” – Shivnath Thukral, Vice President and Head of Public Policy, Meta India
The coalition will aggregate insights across sectors, facilitate essential conversations among stakeholders, and share early warnings and behavioural trends learned from global partners. This effort promotes a whole-of-society response, leveraging knowledge from international collaborations and translating them into region-specific, multilingual awareness campaigns that aim to create meaningful and lasting impact. With the goal of making the internet a safer space for all, the coalition has launched a user safety handbook, a comprehensive guide detailing common frauds and scams people encounter along with preventative measures and industry best practices that help users navigate the digital world securely.
Taking Action Against Scammers
We constantly work to find and disrupt romance scams targeting people across the internet, based on the malicious signals we identify and constantly update, as part of our investigations and scaled detection efforts around the world. In 2024, we took down over 408,000 accounts from Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Benin and Cameroon. They posed as military personnel or businessmen to try to trick people in Australia, the UK, EU, US, South Korea, Syria, Japan and Ukraine into engaging with them. This year, we detected and removed over 116,000 Pages and accounts on Facebook and Instagram, primarily in Nigeria, Ghana, Côte D’Ivoire, Benin, Kenya and Cameroon, engaged in similar activity.
In addition to taking down scam networks, we’ve started testing another layer of defense that uses facial recognition technology. If our detection systems or user reports flag a potential imposter account, we’ll compare the profile pictures on the suspicious account against a public figure’s Facebook and Instagram profile pictures. If there’s a match, we’ll take the account down. More details are available here.