We use artificial intelligence and review teams to detect, review, and take action on millions of pieces of content every day on Facebook and Instagram. WhatsApp uses a combination of techniques to enforce its policies and prevent abuse, including giving people the ability to block and report spam and scams, and using machine learning to tackle fake accounts, fraudulent activity and bulk messaging.
We are constantly working to improve ways of detecting and blocking accounts that purposely deceive, misrepresent, defraud and exploit people for money or property. WhatsApp bans tens of millions of accounts per month, often without a recent user report. This means our automated systems are able to stop abuse even before it is reported.
We’re always working to find, remove, and disrupt scammers targeting people on our platforms. In 2025, we removed over 159 million scam ads, taking down 92% before anyone reported them.
Scammers are likely to use fake accounts in their operations. They use them to impersonate real people, build fake credibility, and reach more victims. By removing fake accounts, we cut off a resource scammers rely on.
Our systems detect and remove most of these proactively before anyone reports them and often before they can be used for harm. While we can't always know what each fake account would have been used for, stopping them early helps prevent potential scams from ever reaching people.
In Q4 2025
1.1B
fake accounts removed from Facebook
99.90%
of this was proactively detected and actioned before it could be reported*
157M
pieces of spam content removed from Facebook
99.50%
of this was proactively detected and actioned before it could be reported*