Phone scams are big business these days, with identity theft scams alone accounting for $2.95 billion in lost revenue in 2024, according to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). To try to combat this fraudulent activity, Google has introduced Fake Call Detection, a new technology aimed at better protecting Google Pixel users from such scams. This is a new layer of security that will display a warning when the system detects a scam call or identity thief. It will be available on Android phones starting this month.
How these identity theft scams work is something you’d expect to see in a science fiction movie: your phone rings. It’s your mother on the other end of the line. There was a terrible accident and she is seriously injured. Worse yet, the hospital she’s at doesn’t take her insurance, so they refuse to treat her until the bill is paid. She urgently needs you to wire money directly to the hospital. Except this bank account doesn’t belong to a hospital, and it’s not your mother’s. This is a scammer who uses deepfake technology and other malware to spoof not only her phone number and contact details, but also her voice – so convincingly that it’s impossible to tell the AI ​​clone from your real mother.
How Google Fake Call Detection Works
Fake call detection will be available on any Android phone running Android 12 (released in 2021) or newer, and it will work if you and the contact whose identity the scammer is impersonating use Phone by Google. This feature will roll out to Pixel devices, but it’s unclear when or if other Android devices will add fake call detection. Here’s how it works: Every time a legitimate contact calls you, their phone sends a silent signal to your phone verifying the correct identity. If your phone doesn’t detect this signal, it automatically pings your contact’s phone. If your contact’s phone indicates that they are not making a phone call, you will receive a pop-up stating that the caller is likely an impersonator and asking you to hang up immediately.
It will be enabled by default when it rolls out in an update, but users can choose to manually disable it in Settings at any time. The fake call detection joins the “verified financial calls” feature announced in May, which alerts users when a scammer posing as a financial institution tries to contact you, and should also help combat a rise in scams in which criminals call you pretending to be Google itself.
Google’s focus on security updates
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Google’s increasing focus on user protection and security measures is in response to the growing global threat of scams. Interpol’s Global Financial Fraud Threat Assessment report, released in March 2026, estimates global losses from fraud at $442 billion in 2025. The report describes applications available on Dark Web black markets that use AI to impersonate celebrities or acquaintances of victims. For those too lazy to create AI clones themselves, enterprising criminals even offer “Deepfake-as-a-Service” products, which can create convincing fakes using just ten recorded seconds of a victim’s voice.
According to the report, impersonation fraud was third on the agency’s list of top global financial fraud threats facing law enforcement in 2024 and 2025. Fake Call Detection is just the latest in a series of Google releases created to combat this and other technology-driven security threats, including Text Message Scam Detection and Live Threat Detection, which monitors real-time applications to detect suspicious behavior. Google also filed a lawsuit in 2025 against Lighthouse, a large company that it says provides users with tools to create phishing scams responsible for the theft of 12.7 million to 115 million credit cards. Google’s Android Marketplace is a frequent target of scammers and malware, including a scheme that deployed more than 200 fake apps to steal money from users’ phone bills.
