WhatsApp has over 2 billion users worldwide, with India alone accounting for a quarter of its user base and boasting over 500 million active accounts. Meta has tried many ways to monetize its service domestically, but its recent efforts to get business on its platform have proven to be winners, at least for Meta. For users, not much.
Over the past two months, the number of spam messages I’ve been receiving on WhatsApp has continued to grow, and it’s now a constant frustration. To make matters worse, all of these messages are from companies that could not have contacted me in the first place.
It started harmlessly enough at my bank. The company began touting all the services available on WhatsApp, positioning the platform as an alternative to calling customer service. That’s fine, but shortly after that I started getting marketing his messages from the bank’s insurance and mortgage departments, and they were sent from different accounts, so I had to block those numbers individually. there was.
The trickle turned into a deluge in December and January when we started receiving marketing texts from a horde of brands like Myntra, Borosil, Eureka Forbes, P&G, M&S, Domino’s, Tanishq, Cult Fit and many more. Well, I have purchased something from each of these brands in the last 12 months. I haven’t signed up to receive your messages, but it’s becoming more and more apparent that WhatsApp is becoming an extension of SMS.
I’m similarly bombarded with SMS spam every day — 4 spam messages on average — but thanks to SMS Organizer, I can’t find any. But that’s not the case with WhatsApp, as these messages appear alongside chats from friends and family. So you have to manually blacklist your business. Meta made a statement to TechCrunch last year outlining its stance on how companies reach out to customers, making it clear that these messages are opt-in.
“Messaging is the new way to conduct business, and it is better than email and phone calls. You need to do business or report problems at any time.”
“We always work with companies to make sure their messages are useful and expected. There is a limit to how many messages we can send in a day. but it is important to businesses and, most importantly, to the people we serve.”
It’s clear that brands are ignoring this guideline. Because in all the brands I listed above, there wasn’t a single instance where I came across a checkbox asking if I wanted to be contacted via WhatsApp.
Has anything changed with WhatsApp in India? In the last few days, I’ve gone from almost no spam to 50% of all incoming messages being spam from various business accounts.October 19, 2022
Here comes @ChaiPoint_cares when I thought what brands were missing in @WhatsApp chats while trying to spam without my explicit approval to target them here pic.twitter .com/1Aq5vXb5pAOctober 10, 2022
Most maddeningly, I started getting spam messages from brands I had never interacted with. The worst is EaseMyTrip. I have never used this service before and have booked flights through an aggregator a few times, but it was through MakeMyTrip.
But EaseMyTrip somehow got my number and started sending me a series of messages about ongoing transactions on their platform starting in December. And once that number was blocked, it started backing up again using another number. I have 3 instances of him of EaseMyTrip in my blocked contacts list, none of which are registered as a business.
Similarly, we have received messages from Croma, CakeZone, Beardo, Olx Autos, Angel One, Neemli Naturals, Intermiles, Dohful, IndusInd Bank and Ekam in the last 30 days. I had never purchased anything or interacted with any of these services before, and in the case of Angel One, I didn’t know it was a brokerage firm until the message was sent.
We’ve seen an increase in spam over the past two months, but this isn’t a new phenomenon and Rest of World has documented the problem well. WhatsApp is still an essential part of India’s digital ecosystem, but with the shift to business his messaging, Meta has turned the service into a spam hell in the country.
When RCS was enabled in India, Google faced a similar problem, with messages spamming users in bulk. Thankfully, Google responded quickly and disabled companies from using RCS to send ads. I doubt Meta is doing something similar on his WhatsApp.
