- Up to 96% of WhatsApp users receive daily commercial spam messages, says LocalCircles report
- 54% of users get 1-3 promotional messages daily, while 11% get eight or more messages
- Spam messages often use WhatsApp Business, which lets firms pay to send bulk messages
Up to 96% of WhatsApp users reported receiving commercial spam messages on a daily basis, as per a report by LocalCircles on Wednesday. The Supreme Court on Feb. 3 had directed the social media company and owner Meta Platforms to file an affidavit to provide an undertaking that user data would not be used for advertising purposes.
The judicial body warned the firm that failure to do so would lead to the dismissal of the case Meta had put forward to oppose the Competition Commision Of India's ruling against WhatsApp's 2021 Privacy Policy. The policy was to facilitate increased data sharing for business purposes, which led to the CCI slapping a Rs 214 crore fine on the company.
LocalCircles polled 13,362 users, out of which 96% reported receiving promotional or spam WhatsApp messages every day. More than half of the respondents (54%) reported receiving one to three promotional or spam messages daily, while 30% reported receiving eight to seven messages of this sort, and 11% reported that they received eight or more messages day-after -day.
The survey also involved community discussions where users reported receiving such messages via the WhatsApp Business feature, where users can pay the social media platform to send messages to other users.
The report covered an example where a fraudulent message was sent by an account named 'FinanceBuddha; to a considerable number of users regarding them allegedly receiving their loan application through WhatsApp Business and then spamming messages repeatedly over 45 days stating that their loan application had been approved and they were ready to remit the loan.
None of the users had applied for the loan mentioned in the fraudulent messages, as per the report. They alleged that WhatsApp might be turning a blind eye to such activities or actively enabling them in order to increase its revenue.
A majority of the spam messages were from real estate and financial services firms with 71% of them originating from these fields.
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