# Google DeepMind and Singapore Government announce new AI tool to protect citizens against scams

The system fine-tunes Gemma to identify localized social engineering scams directly on smartphones without compromising end-to-end encryption.

- A two-stage pipeline pairs a lightweight fast screening classifier with a fine-tuned Gemma model for multi-turn contextual analysis.
- The model was fine-tuned on local scam patterns, including impersonations of Singaporean banks, public institutions, and local figures.
- Processing runs locally on the phone to deliver real-time warnings without sending private chat data to cloud servers.
- Training took place inside GovTech's isolated Google Cloud environment using synthetic dialogues and anonymized scam reports without citizen data.

## Why it matters

Messaging platforms and operating systems can now detect social engineering fraud locally without breaking end-to-end encryption.

## Sources

- [Google DeepMind: Google DeepMind and Singapore Government announce new AI tool to protect citizens against scams](https://deepmind.google/blog/on-device-ai-scam-detection-mddi)

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Summarized by dstilled on 2026-10-14. https://dstilled.ai/story/c509aed8-0ad8-4cba-9d31-8b068468115f