Washington: Google on Tuesday announced a new filter to restrict spammers from sending misleading messages, which would be focused on filtering the identical looking characters.
The filters deal with similar looking letters from the Unicode Consortium that could let spammers fool people. Most companies, apps, and websites use Unicode standard icons, so that characters work across platforms. However, some characters look nearly identical, such as the Latin and Cyrillic lowercase "a."
Scammers can exploit the fact that some characters look very similar to alphabets, and by mixing and matching them, they can deceive unsuspecting victims.
The Unicode Consortium lists these types of character combinations as `highly restricted.`
Google said its new filters will knock out any of these combinations included in emails sent to Gmail users.
