WhatsApp has designed various tools and features to help us stay secure but it is still used to spread malware and spam. It has the option of control of who sees your personal information like last seen, profile photo, status, and others. You have an option to block a contact if you don’t want to interact.

There are more than 1.5 million WhatsApp users and over 1 million receives spam messages on a daily basis. The spammers use different techniques like sending a message that your WhatsApp needs an update, you may receive a link saying it is from the owner of WhatsApp and they want some data, etc. They may also clutter your inbox with automated messages.

Another technique used by the spammer is the use of custom devices with multiple SIMs and coded simulators that masquerade as a user and run various instances of WhatsApp.

WhatsApp has taken various steps to stop the spammers like catching them without breaking encryption and reading the content of the message by using “user actions” that include registration metadata and the rate of sending a message.

WhatsApp bans such accounts by using three different checkpoints; they ban spammer at registration, during messaging and in response to reporting by other users. It is also following Facebook immune system model to perform real-time on every read and write action to define abusive behavior and train its machine learning system.

To provide more security to their users, WhatsApp is using a machine learning algorithm to get basic information like device details, IP address and carries information about malicious accounts.

It also requires a personal phone number during the registration. If a new number similar to one misused before tries to register an account, WhatsApp throw them before they send any message or create an account.

WhatsApp also looks for things like whether an account has typing inductors or it sends 100 messages with 10 seconds after getting register. They take serious action and ban such accounts.

Given below are few tips that how can a user identify whether a message is a spam or not and avoid it.

Check misspellings or grammatical mistakes in the message if it contains any minor mistake then avoid it. Don’t tap on links that are sent by an unknown person. Do not respond to messages that ask you for personal information like credit card or bank account. Don’t open any messages that ask you to forward the message and you will get a reward.