Android Will Warn You If A Scammer Asks To Share Your Screen On A Call

Google has slowly been improving Android with new security systems — like upgraded features that help protect you from message scams — and now the company is taking things a step further with in-call scam protection that Google says should help determine if scammers are trying to get access to your financial apps. The new feature is part of an expanding pilot program, which Google says is rolling out to more users now.

Basically, when you're on a call and sharing your screen with someone and you launch a financial application like your bank app, the new system will now check if the person you are talking with is in your contacts. If that person is not, then your Android phone will generate a warning noting that the call is likely a scam, and that scammers might be trying to use the call to access your finances. The company outlined the feature in a new security blog post, and the new pilot comes hot on the heels of Google's latest Circle to Search scam checker, which allows you to circle items on your screen and check if they are a scam, too.

The entire new system is designed around breaking the "spell" that scammers can sometimes seem to cast with their social engineering tactics. Google says that once the warning triggers, it will require you to wait 30 seconds before you can continue. During this time, the sense of urgency that scammers often rely on will hopefully be broken through by logic, and that'll give you a chance to stop yourself before giving out your banking information to a bad actor. 

As noted above, the feature first dropped as part of a pilot program in the UK, and Google says that it "helped thousands of users end calls that could have cost them a significant amount of money." Of course, even with a system like this in place, it still relies on the user to be able to spot when they are being scammed, and hopefully the downtime between when the warning pops up and when you can dismiss it is enough time to help break users out of any kind of panic that the scammers might have riled them up into.

Beyond the feature rolling out to more users, Google also says that it will start implementing the protection for more app types, including some peer-to-peer payment apps (such as Venmo, PayPal, etc), and it's likely we'll see even more Android security features in the months to come.