A new defence tool against scammers is being added to Microsoft's Edge web browser. While their "Defender" security suite does already have the ability to warn about website scams, that assumes it's something they already know about. What if you're the first to see it?
The aim of this new feature is to alert users about the veracity of the sort of thing many of us will have seen - websites and popups designed to frighten you suggesting that your machine may be infected or similar, and that all you need to do is install their product or call their tech support number to fix it.
The way this works is that an AI powered learning system will be running on the local machine which knows the sort of patterns these sites adopt. So while they may not have data that knows for a fact that the website you've gone to is a scam because other perople have visited it before and they've confirmed it, it will take an educated guess based on what is being displayed. This means that even if you're the only person to ever have visited the page, it should catch it.
If the tool suspects a scam, it will take control of that tab and show a warning that the site looks suspcious along with a screenshot of the site you were looking at. It wil ask whether you want to continue anyway or close the site. It will also ask if you'd like to submit this data to Defender to improve its database of scams (including if you think the AI tool guessed wrong, which is also useful information). This optional request is the only data that gets sent to Microsoft. The tool itself runs on the local device and doesn't connect to the internet to provide the warnings.
At the moment, this tool is in the later stages of testing and being rolled out to the set of people that have actively asked to test the latest changes to the browser. As long as no major issues are discovered, expect it to be rolled out more generally shortly.