Aug. 6 (UPI) -- WhatsApp has taken down 6.8 million accounts linked to scammers around the world, Meta said. WhatsApp rolled out a new anti-scam measure to alert users of scams. Many of the scams were tied to criminal organizations in South East Asia, according to Meta.

WhatsApp has taken down 6.8 million accounts that were “linked to criminal scam centers” targeting people online around that world, its parent company Meta said this week. The account deletions, which Meta said took place over the first six months of the year,

Over 6.8 million accounts have been scrubbed off of WhatsApp as part of a crackdown on ‘criminal scam centres’, most of them in South East Asia. Meta is working to target too-good-to-be-true offers and unsolicited texts unleashed to steal people’s personal information or money.