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In the US, Google is testing a new alert on Android phones designed to warn consumers in real-time about scam calls that impersonate banks and trusted institutions.
The alert addresses a scam involving fraudsters attempting to trick victims into sharing their phone screens to reveal sensitive information on their banking apps or even initiate a financial transfer. Google's safeguard will trigger when the Android phone detects that a participating financial app is open, screen sharing is occurring, and a phone call is in progress with a number not listed in your contacts.
(Credit: Google)The phone will then display a warning that alerts you to the inherent danger, offering an option to end the call and stop screen sharing with one tap, the company wrote in a blog post.
“The warning includes a 30-second pause period before you’re able to continue, which helps break the ‘spell’ of the scammer's social engineering, disrupting the false sense of urgency and panic commonly used to manipulate you into a scam,” Google added.
The company began piloting the system in the UK in May and found that it “helped thousands of users end calls that could have cost them a significant amount of money.” Since then, Google has also expanded the scam protection to cover most financial apps in the UK. In addition, the company’s pilot to test the scam protection has moved beyond the UK to Brazil and India.
In the US, the safeguard will only trigger for eligible apps. This includes “a number of popular fintechs like Cash App and banks, including JPMorganChase,” Google added in the blog post. “We’ve also started to pilot this protection with more app types, including peer-to-peer (P2P) payment apps,” the company noted. “We look forward to learning from these pilots and bringing these critical safeguards to even more users in the future."
Google is also developing other alerts to flag scam phone calls in real-time. However, the same security measures have also raised privacy concerns, as they involve Google’s AI software listening to specific phrases during phone calls to trigger an alert. For now, the company has only rolled out real-time AI-powered scam detection for Pixel devices as an opt-in.