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WhatsApp has taken down 6.8 million accounts that were linked to criminal scam centers targeting people online around the world, its parent company Meta said this week. The account deletions, which Meta said took place over the first six months of the year, arrive as part of wider company efforts to crack down on scams. In a Tuesday announcement, Meta said it was also rolling out new tools on WhatsApp to help people spot scams, including a new safety overview that the platform will show when someone who is not in a users contacts adds them to a group, as well as ongoing test alerts to pause before responding. Scams are becoming all too common and increasingly sophisticated in today’s digital world with too-good-to-be-true offers and unsolicited messages attempting to steal consumers’ information or money filling our phones, social media and other corners of the internet each day. Meta noted that some of the most prolific sources of scams are criminal scam centers, which often span from forced labor operated by organized crime and warned that such efforts often target people on many platforms at once, in attempts to evade detection. That means that a scam campaign may start with messages over text or a dating app, for example, and then move to social media and payment platforms, the California-based company said. Meta, which also owns Facebook and Instagram, pointed to recent scam efforts that it said attempted to use its own apps as well as TikTok, Telegram and AI-generated messages made using ChatGPT to offer payments for fake likes, enlist people into a pyramid scheme and/or lure others into cryptocurrency investments. Meta linked these scams to a criminal scam center in Cambodia and said it disrupted the campaign in partnership with ChatGPT maker OpenAI.
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Samsung is one of many companies that have been pushing for employees to return to the office fulltime. However, now the brand is taking RTO efforts in the U.S. one step further with a tool that tracks attendance for a group in its semiconductor business. In an internal email, seen by Business Insider, Samsung informed employees about the new compliance tracking tool. “This tool will provide each Manager with visibility to the number of days & time in building metrics for each team member,” the email said. It continued, “This will ensure that team members are fulfilling their expectation regarding in office work – however that is defined with their business leader – as well as guarding against instances of lunch/coffee badging.” In 2023 the brand embraced a global hybrid work model, rolling out 500 new jobs. While the specifics varied, the majority of the postings (58.3%) included the ability to work from home at least part of the work week. The brand also gave employees in the company’s corporate offices in South Korea one Friday off a month.However, last April, after posting lower than expected sales, the brand asked its corporate executives to begin working six days a week in order to “inject a sense of crisis” into its workforce. Considering that performance of our major units, including Samsung Electronics Co., fell short of expectations in 2023, we are introducing the six-day work week for executives to inject a sense of crisis and make all-out efforts to overcome this crisis, a Samsung Group executive told the Korea Economic Daily. This May, Samsung asked employees to begin returning to the office full time. The following month, it updated employees on the RTO initiative. “We are already experiencing increased foot traffic daily, with more cars in the parking lot and hungry mouths in our cafeterias on Fridays, to name just a few signs,” Samsung said in an email viewed by BI. At the time, Samsung also noted that it was developing a tool to track attendance. Employee tracking might sound offbeat, but workplace surveillance is on the rise. According to a recent ExpressVPN survey, 74% of U.S. employers now use online tracking tools to monitor work activities. That includes real-time screen tracking (59%) and web browsing logs (62%). Likewise, 61% use AI-powered analytics to measure productivity and around 67% collect biometric data to monitor things like behavior and attendance. Still, that doesn’t mean it’s popular among employees or feels all that ethical. While most companies (three out of four) use biometric surveillance, only 22% of employees know theyre being monitored, according to the same report. Likewise, 17% of employees said theyd be very likely to resign over workplace surveillance. Another 32% said they’d strongly consider it. It’s unclear how Samsung’s new tracking tool will work, how closely employees will be monitored, and how many employees will be impacted. Fast Company reached out to the brand but did not hear back by the time of publication. Samsung told employees they will find out more about the tracking system soon. “Additional information regarding the new tool will be made available to Managers this month,” the email to employees said.
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E-Commerce
Denver has a sidewalk problem. About 40% of its sidewalks are missing or dont meet the standards of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Remarkably, the citys own plan recommended a fix over 20 years ago: Move responsibility for sidewalk repair from property owners to the city and implement an annual fee to pay for the program. The fix might seem simple, but it took over 20 years and grassroots advocacy to make it happen. In 2022 we just got tired of waiting and decided to do a citizen-initiated ordinance, says Jill Locantore, executive director of the Denver Streets Partnership, a group of community organizations pushing for multimodal streets in the city. Which is basically implementing exactly what the citys own plans had been saying we should do. A broken sidewalk in Denver, ca. 2016. [Photo: Jeffrey Beall/Flickr] Sidewalk advocates fought and won. The ballot measure, dubbed Denver Deserves Sidewalks, swayed 56% of voters. There was no organized opposition to the measure. Dont underestimate how sexy sidewalks are, says Locantore. Sidewalk repairs started July 2025. Could Denvers program serve as a model? Denver isnt alone with its sidewalk woes. Cities across the U.S. are grappling with how to fix broken, narrow sidewalks or build missing ones. Los Angeles, dubbed the city of broken sidewalks in an article by late parking guru Donald Shoup, has roughly 9,300 miles of sidewalk and no clear plan for fixing them. With the car-free 2028 Summer Olympics looming, the pressure is on to find a solution. If people break their hips or knees or wrists falling on a broken sidewalk what terrible advertising this is for L.A., Shoup told Next City last year. Paris is a city of light, and L.A. will be the city of deferred maintenance. In 2010, Angelenos with disabilities sued the city of L.A., alleging that broken and inaccessible sidewalks were a violation of the American with Disabilities Act. In 2016, as part of the Willits settlement, the city agreed to spend about $1.4 billion over 30 years to fix sidewalks, with priority given to requests submitted by residents with mobility disabilities. Despite the big dollar commitment, most of L.A.s broken sidewalks remain broken, and experts say that the Willits case has largely failed to improve the pedestrian experience. People with mobility disabilities still wait up to a decade for sidewalk repairs. Less than 1% [of sidewalks] have been fixed, says Jessica Meaney, executive director of Investing in Place, a local nonprofit transportation advocacy group. So the lawsuit that people thought was going to solve a lot of problems well, its solving some important ones, but at an incredibly slow pace. Broken sidewalks dont just impede mobility for pedestrians; they also come with a huge price tag. L.A. spends millions every year on liability lawsuits caused by broken public infrastructure. Who should be responsible for sidewalks? It turns out that pre-2022 Denver is not an outlier: Most major cities expect property owners to foot the bill for fixing sidewalks. Laura Messier, a researcher in public health and public spaces at the University of Southern California, compared sidewalk policies in the 30 most populated cities in the U.S. To her surprise, she found 77% require the adjacent property owner to fix the sidewalk. This presents a problem. Cities are not enforcing that responsibility because they dont want resident blowback, says Messier. And so it seems like theres sort of this collective wishful thinking that somehow this critical infrastructure will take care of itself. Taking on responsibility for sidewalks means Denver is treating sidewalks as part of its overall transportation system. To fund repairs, most property owners are charged an annual fee of $150. Income-qualified residents can apply for a rebate. As part of Willits, L.A. has taken on responsibility for sidewalk repairs with the goal of releasing responsibility back to property owners, fix and release. However, the pace of repairs is so slow that its unclear how the city will achieve this goal. With over 9,000 miles of sidewalk, L.A. is fixing roughly 15 mils and adding 50 curb ramps per year. Fear of liability, in my mind, is driving every decision cities are making about sidewalks, Messier says. Its a Sisyphean system: On the hook for millions per year in liability lawsuits, L.A. is also legally required to spend millions per year on a sidewalk program that has yet to make a dent in a backlog of repairs that might prevent future liability lawsuits. As Meaney has stressed, Los Angeles doesnt have a sidewalk program it has the Willits settlement. And Willits doesnt address street infrastructure as a whole, says Messier. Instead, it mandates that the city spend a certain amount per year on sidewalks. The consequences can prove counterintuitive. I think that the citys finding that some of the places that theyve fixed are already getting damaged again from tree roots, Messier says, noting that sidewalks and street trees are managed separately. Were spending all this money, but it doesnt really feel like were going to end up with long-term improvement. The root of the issue is that cities have prioritized infrastructure for cars over all other possible uses of public space. If cities treated streets more holistically, they might be able to prioritize trees and sidewalks. Where we might have excess lane capacity for cars, we might be able to widen parkways, widen sidewalks and really solve the tree root-sidewalk conflict so that it doesnt become a problem in the future, says Messier. Are sidewalks having a moment? There are signs that L.A. residents want better streets for people outside of cars. Last March, voters passed Measure HLA, mandating the city follow its own mobility plan when it repaves streets. Since the measure passed, progress on more bike, pedestrian and bus infrastructure has been slow. In October, L.A. Mayor Karen Bass signed Executive Directive No. 9 to streamline public infrastructure improvements and create a multi-year plan for projects. Would L.A. property owners be willing to pay a sidewalk fee? Maybe. Lets look at Denvers revenue generating [program], lets look at a bond, lets look at a sales tax, says Meaney. Both inside and outside City Hall, people are like, Wait, this is so broken, lets fix it. This story was produced through our Equitable Cities Fellowship for Social Impact Design, which is made possible with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. This story was originally published by Next City, a nonprofit news outlet covering solutions for equitable cities. Sign up for Next City’s newsletter for their latest articles and events.
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