For some links you receive in a chat, you may see a suspicious link indicator.

This indicator may appear when a link contains a combination of characters that is considered unusual. Spammers may use these character combinations to trick you into tapping on links that appear to go to a legitimate website, but actually take you to a malicious site.

Here is an example of a suspicious link:

https://ẉhatsapp.com/free-tickets

Note: The first character looks like the letter "w" but is instead the character "ẉ", which means a spammer may have tricked you into visiting a website that wasn’t actually related to WhatsApp.

When receiving links, carefully review the content of the message. If a link is marked suspicious, you can tap the link and a pop-up message will appear, highlighting the unusual characters within the link. Then you can choose to open the link or go back to the chat.

WhatsApp automatically performs checks to determine if a link is suspicious. To protect your privacy, these checks take place entirely on your device, and because of end-to-end encryption, WhatsApp can’t see the content of your messages.

To learn more about how to stay safe on WhatsApp, read this article.