Google has developed a tool to detect phone scam attempts

According to a study by the Global Anti-Scam Alliance (GASA) and ScamAdviser, $1,000 billion goes into the pockets of scammers every year. Telephone scams are among the most widespread. Fraudsters compete in ingenuity to extort money from their targets.

“Fraudulent calls are evolving, becoming more and more sophisticated, damaging and difficult to identify,” Google wrote on its security blog this Wednesday. The American company has therefore developed Scam Detection, a tool using artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze the content of a telephone conversation and launch an alert at the slightest suspicious sign, reports Lemon Squeezer.

A test in the United States

Google has identified the operating methods of phone scammers and trained its AI to detect them. The tool will activate, for example, “if a caller claims to be from your bank and asks you to transfer funds urgently”. It will analyze the call and if it is indeed spam or a scam, it “may provide an audible and haptic alert as well as a visual warning”.

Google would like to reassure users about the protection of their data, specifying that no information will be stored on the phone or sent to the company’s servers. For now, Scam Detection is only available in the United States, where it is being tested in a beta version on Pixel 6 or newer phones.

The firm did not indicate when the tool could be deployed more widely. However, it also announced that Google Play Protect now has a real-time alert in the event of malicious operations detected on the device. Here again, Pixel smartphones, from version 6, are the first served. But the tool “will be available on other phone manufacturers in the coming months.”