Android is beefing up scam protection for texts and calls — just in time

Android already has spam protection for phone calls and text messages. But while these features can help curb unwanted communications from shady characters, it is not always obvious when you’re getting scammed on the calls or messages you accept in real time. For this, Android has a new scam detection solution powered by Gemini.

The advent of AI has made it easier for scammers to target individuals and trick them into handing over personal data or money. Thanks to voice cloning technology and deepfake videos that can impersonate real humans you may know in real life, some of these scams are sophisticated enough to deceive even the more suspicious among us.

You are essentially inviting it to scan through your personal information and analyze it in search of scammy behavior.

But just as AI has made the call and texting scam landscape more hazardous to tread, AI might also be the thing to save us — or at least that is what Google believes. The company recently announced new scam protection features for Google Messages on Android that are powered by Google Gemini.

Once enabled, the new enhanced AI-powered scam features offer three points of additional protection over Google’s existing scam prevention capabilities. They:

1. Use Google’s powerful cloud servers to analyze long conversation threads within the Google Messages app, searching for signs of scammer intent based on the context of the conversations.
2. Search for malicious links — both existing and newly generated — within messages and flags them as unsafe to keep users from clicking on them.
3. Offer a redesigned warning system that gives users more time to stop and consider the safety of links embedded within messages to prevent accidental clicks.

The catch, of course, is that to use the new AI-powered scam protection features in Android, you have to trust Gemini to keep an eye on your text messages. You are essentially inviting it to scan through your personal information and analyze it in search of scammy behavior.

Google thought about this beforehand, which is why all conversations are routed through Private AI Compute, a system Google introduced in late 2025 that isolates your data on Google’s servers with additional privacy, security, and encryption in place. According to Google, “This ensures sensitive data processed by Private AI Compute remains accessible only to you and no one else, not even Google.”

To further ease concerns, the enhanced scam protection features in Google Messages are entirely opt-in, so you can choose to disregard, if you don’t want Gemini snooping through your texts.

RELATED: Time to declare independence from phishing scams — here's how

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In addition to better scam prevention tools for Google Messages, Google also brought two meaningful upgrades to scam call protection:

1. Automatic screen-share privacy now hides private content, like passwords, credit card information, and banking details in Chrome and Android WebView while in screen-sharing mode with friends, family, or colleagues. These features are in addition to existing screen share protections available in native apps.
2. Proactive call-forwarding protection prevents incoming callers from forwarding your call to another number in an attempt to steal one-time passcodes that would give them access to one of your accounts.

Enhanced protection mode for Google Messages is rolling out to users now, first on Google Pixel and “hundreds of millions of additional users later this year.” As for added protections for phone calls, these will be implemented automatically.

If you haven’t already enabled Android’s existing spam text and call features, follow our detailed guides at the links. Both of these can help you reclaim a bit of peace from incessant scammers trying to trick you into turning over personal information.

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