5 Tips to Fight Spam Messages on WhatsApp

If you too are tired of receiving spam messages on WhatsApp, you have probably wondered how to reduce the probability of receiving unwanted messages in chat. In this insight we provide you 5 Tips to Fight Spam Messages on WhatsAppwhich consist of activating some advanced privacy settings, hiding the profile photo from contacts not in the address book, blocking unwanted numbers, and so on. These measures, while not completely eliminating the risk of receiving spam messages, can help reduce as much as possible the risk of falling victim to those who send them to attempt online scams.

1. Enable advanced privacy settings

To reduce the chances of receiving spam messages on WhatsApp, it is important enable advanced privacy settings made available by the popular messaging app Meta.

Visiting the section Settings > Privacy For example, on WhatsApp you can set who can view Last seen and online statusadded to the groupsshares of the state, Read receipts of messages received (the famous “blue ticks”) and so on.

Going to the section Advancedfurthermore, it is possible to activate the settings Protect IP address during calls And Disable link previewswhich are useful for making it more difficult for third-party websites to detect your location and IP address respectively.

2. Hide your profile picture from people who aren’t in your address book

A specific privacy setting that we encourage you to enable to mitigate privacy and spam issues on WhatsApp is the Hide profile picture from people not in your address book. This way, if your cell phone number ends up in the wrong hands (a spammer or worse, a scammer), you will prevent the latter from extracting valuable information about your life by analyzing your profile photo.

To do this, in this case too, simply go to the section Settings > Privacy of WhatsApp, tap on the wording Profile picture and activate the option My contacts.

3. Use social networks with caution

Use social networks with caution It is of fundamental importance to avoid leaving “crumbs” of data along your online path, which could allow malicious people of various kinds to trace our most intimate contact information, such as our mobile number for example.

If you have an account on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, etc., consider the possibility of set it to private (so that only those you accept as friends or followers can see your posts and data) or, at the very least, set a maximum privacy level for the most sensitive information (such as contact details).

4. Stay up to date on online scams

Spam messages are very often delivered by scammers and other shady figures on the web. Here’s why stay up to date on online scams can be crucial to reduce as much as possible the probability of getting caught up in unpleasant situations. To do this, you can continue to follow the Geopop online magazine and all our social channels, where from time to time we delve into topics related to cybersecurity.

5. Don’t reply to spam messages

While following all the tips that we have listed, the probability of receiving spam messages will not be completely eliminated. This is why the last point of this article – do not reply to spam messages – is equally important to follow. By the way, if you don’t know how to recognize a message from a spammer or a scammer, try comparing it with the following “identikit”.

• Presence of spelling or grammatical errors.
• Request to open links to receive new WhatsApp features or other benefits.
• Request to share your personal or banking data.
• Request to forward a message (usually containing a link) to all your contacts.
• Asking you to pay to continue using WhatsApp or to use a special version of the application (sometimes advertised as “WhatsApp Gold”).

In addition to not responding to messages of this type, we suggest that you block the number who forwarded them to you and report it as spam.