Why enable it
Scam messages are one of the most common ways people are tricked into giving away money or personal information. With Message Protection enabled, harmful messages from unknown senders are detected and gathered in one place in the app, making them easy to identify and avoid.
Enabling Message Protection
Setup grants three permissions, each shown as a card with an explanation and an Allow button. Each button opens the matching Android system prompt.
- Notification listener access is needed to read incoming instant messages, such as those from Instagram and WhatsApp, and check them.
- Contacts access is needed to ensure user privacy: only messages from unknown contacts are scanned, and conversations with known contacts are never analyzed.
- SMS permission is needed to access text messages for checking.
Once instant-message and SMS protection are active, a See your message activity button opens the list of detected scam messages.
If protection stops working later, it is worth checking that all three permissions are still granted, as notification listener access in particular can be turned off in the system settings.
Seeing detected messages
The list of detected scam messages can be reviewed at any time. If a message was flagged by mistake, it can be corrected: open the message and choose Mark as safe to remove it from the list.
Marking a message as safe deletes it from the harmful messages list, and is best done only when there is no doubt that the message is genuine. This option is available for 30 days after a message is received.
When a scam message is detected
Detected messages appear in the app in real time. A newly detected message is added to the list on the Messaging screen, the count on the Messaging card updates, and the activity statistics update to match.
Opening a detected message shows its details, headed "Harmful message detected", including where it was found (the source app), the date and time, and the sender. A note recommends caution, advising the user to block the sender and delete the message.
A Go to message button opens the message in its original app. This button is not available for Instagram messages, which cannot be opened directly. If the message was flagged by mistake, the Mark as safe option is available here as well.