AntiScam Pango, the Singapore government's new scam-warning app, is now open for people to try on Android. It checks new messages on WhatsApp, Telegram and the Messages app as they arrive, and shows a Scam Alert when a conversation looks suspicious. Its official site says it is "currently in beta on Android." The government agency behind it, Singapore's Government Technology Agency, launched it on Wednesday, Nov. 4, according to a news report.
The app grows out of the scam-spotting work the agency and Google DeepMind described in October, according to the same report. The minister who unveiled it said the two are working on more advanced AI models to make it smarter. The app's terms list Google's Gemma model among the AI it uses, and say the agency may give such models extra training on its own collection of scam messages. The terms also say some features, including an enhanced scanning mode that uses Gemma, need a separate download and a more powerful phone, so they may not work on every device.
In October, Google DeepMind said Gemma had been given extra training on local scam conversations, including people pretending to be public institutions, banks and local figures. Scam filters have usually scanned messages on a company's computers, Google DeepMind says. The minister said scrambling chats so only the people in them can read them also means no one else can see a scam unfolding and step in, according to the report. Google DeepMind said its work with the Singapore agency shows messaging companies one way to balance protecting users with keeping chats private.
Pango reads the notifications that pop up on the phone as messages arrive, and its AI runs on the phone itself. The government says messages leave the device only when a user chooses to report one, and that neither it nor anyone else can read people's chats through the app.
Pango does not block or delete messages. A Scam Alert means "stop and check before you act," the site says, not that the person has been scammed. The app's own help pages say it will sometimes get things wrong, missing some scams and flagging some harmless chats. It can only check messages that produce a notification, so a muted chat or one the person already has open may be missed. It understands only English for now, the help pages say, so a scam in Chinese, Malay or Tamil may slip past it.
The help pages say the app needs an Android phone running Android 12 or newer with at least 6GB of memory, and the download is about 300MB because it carries the AI model. The agency says it is not on iPhones because Apple's software does not currently let an app read other apps' notifications as they arrive, and that it is looking at other ways to bring it there. The app's site says Singapore had 16,281 scam cases in the first half of 2026, and that more than 4,000 of them reached victims through WhatsApp or Telegram.
The government has not said how many scams Pango caught in testing, or how often it wrongly flags an ordinary chat. It has not said when other languages, more messaging apps or an iPhone version will come. The terms say the agency is under no obligation to turn the test into a full service.