WhatsApp studies how to avoid SPAM on its messaging platform

Despite the fact that in recent years SPAM via email has dropped considerably, mainly due to filters that natively include the main mail servers, SPAM is also present in WhatsApp and its use is increasing, which seems to have forced the company to consider methods to avoid it.

The worst thing that could happen to WhatsApp is that become a SPAM platform. Surely on more than one occasion we have received a forwarded message from a friend who claims that WhatsApp will start to cost money and that we forward the message so that we can continue to use it for free to at least 10 people.

All messages of this type related to the cost or operation of WhatsApp they have always been and will be false but the irrational fear that some users show of having to pay for their messaging application forces them to believe this type of hoax and share it as soon as possible.

When we receive a message from a contact that is not in our agenda, WhatsApp asks us if we want to report that number as SPAM, so that the contact will be blocked by the application. We can also classify it as SPAM through your contact information, from where we can also store the number in our address book.

How WhatsApp spammers work

Spammers never send their messages to a single contact, instead they do it in a multiple way to all contacts, including telephone numbers that you have collected from the Internet or that you have purchased directly on the Dark Web, and that generally come from information that has been stolen from attacks that have been carried out on servers where our telephone number is reflected.

WhatsApp intends to treat in a special way messages that it detects have been forwarded a large number of times so that they are blocked automatically, but if you do not block the origin of it, it is like the whiting that bites its tail. Currently, WhatsApp allows us to select up to 30 messages together and forward them up to 25 times without ever receiving a notice from the application. If we exceed that number, the application will tell us that we have forwarded that message too many times, but it still allows us to resend it as many times as we want.

If the user needs to send a message to multiple contacts, WhatsApp recommends using the Broadcast List feature, where only the contacts that have your phone number in the address book will receive your message, these broadcast lists cannot be used by spammers since the messages you send to the recipients will never reach their destination, since they have no stored your phone number on the contact list.

For some time, WhatsApp has been using different tools to prevent SPAM, but needs the collaboration of all users to improve the service, so it invites us to actively collaborate every time we receive an unwanted message of this type reporting it as SPAM.