Phone scams have gotten significantly harder to spot. AI voice-cloning tools now make it possible for fraudsters to even mimic someone you know in real time—your parent, your boss, your friend—using a number that looks completely legitimate on your caller ID. A new feature from Google looks to fight that.
Google has begun rolling out a fake call detection update to its phone app on Android devices running Android 12 and later, according to Wired. The feature works by sending a silent, encrypted confirmation signal between two Android devices the moment a call is placed. If that verification doesn’t come through—meaning the caller may be spoofing a number from your contacts—the app displays an immediate warning prompting you to hang up.
When a call is flagged, the contact’s photo is removed from the screen and their name is replaced with “Unknown caller” in the call log—a small but deliberate design choice to underscore that something may be off.
The technology is built on RCS, the messaging standard that has increasingly replaced SMS, and uses end-to-end encryption to keep the verification process private, according to Engadget.
Google says it chose RCS specifically because of its potential for broad adoption across platforms, meaning the technology could eventually come to iPhone—though Apple has not yet announced plans to implement a similar feature.
For now, the update is available on Android 12 and up through the Google Phone app.
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