Meta Disables 150K Accounts Linked to Southeast Asia Scam Centers in Global Crackdown

Meta disabled over 150,000 accounts linked to Southeast Asia scam centers in a coordinated global crackdown involving 11 countries.

• •The operation resulted in 21 arrests by the Royal Thai Police, building on a December 2025 pilot that removed 59,000 accounts.
• •Meta introduced new warnings on Facebook for suspicious accounts, alerts for suspicious WhatsApp QR code device-linking requests, and expanded AI-based scam detection on Messenger.
• •In 2025, Meta removed over 159 million scam ads and took down 10.9 million accounts tied to criminal scam centers.
• •The U.K. government launched a new Online Crime Centre backed by £30 million, planning to deploy AI to flag fraud patterns and use scam-baiting chatbots to gather intelligence.

This summary was automatically generated by AI based on the original article and may not be fully accurate.