Google's Phone app can now flag incoming calls that are pretending to be someone in your contacts.
The feature, rolling out as part of Google's June Android update, watches for calls that originate from a number already saved in your contacts but show signs of fraud. When it spots a mismatch, the app surfaces a warning before you engage. Google describes impersonation scams as a growing threat but hasn't specified exactly which signals trip the flag. The same update also brings expanded Apple AirDrop support to Samsung Galaxy S25, Z Flip 7, and Z Fold 7 devices.
Spoofing a phone number is trivially cheap, and AI voice cloning has made the resulting calls far harder to dismiss on instinct alone. Catching suspicious calls at the app layer, before the conversation starts, is a better choke point than asking users to train their own skepticism in real time against someone who may sound exactly like their sister.
The unanswered question is how Google defines "suspicious." If the detection leans on metadata signals that scammers can study and sidestep, this feature has a shorter shelf life than the announcement implies.