Watch out for the new scam running on WhatsApp

Scammers are everywhere, as well as in real life, even on social media and messaging platforms such as WhatsApp. They try to deceive you and then steal your money, but what is their technique and how can we defend ourselves?

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WhatsApp scam: it starts with always kind messages

Maybe someone has already had to deal with some scammer on WhatsApp. They usually buy a VoIP number (which cannot be used on WhatsApp) and can have different targets ranging from a single person to a random group of people. To start they look for phone numbers in a completely random way and then, once they find a valid number, they send a message like Sorry, who are you? I found you in my address book.

They are always kind in such a way as to earn our trust, starting to ask for details about our identity, our work, our age, all surrounded by some compliments to make us feel appreciated. As you can see from this screenshot posted by wabetainfo, the scammer after a long conversation asked to be added on social channels like Instagram and Facebook.

This very old technique is still used today because unfortunately in some cases it still works. The scammers will try to access your public information on Facebook and Instagram, such as your list of friends and other interesting details that could help them steal your money.

In fact, their next move is to blackmail you, saying they will share some confidential images, which can be true, if you share them naively, or edit using Adobe Photoshop, with your friends and family if you don’t send them money. But they will not stop blackmailing you after receiving money, because they want more money and they will never stop.

Not only via WhatsApp, but also via email and sales channels

All of this not only happens on WhatsApp or other messaging platforms but can also happen in cases of online sales. It is possible that once an ad is posted online, a scammer may contact us showing interest in the item for sale and then offer us strange payment methods, just like I did.

As you can see from the screenshots above, the scammer tried to buy the headphones I was selling, offering me a wire transfer payment, which would arrive once he received the package.

To make everything more truthful, the e-mail from an existing bank also arrived, but looking carefully at the e-mail it is easy to understand that something is wrong. For example, the wording “Welcome” in the form of GIF , but above all the sender’s email address which is certainly not the official one of the bank for which they pretend.

In this case the only thing that could have taken me would have been my headphones and nothing more, but there are cases in which maybe they offer us PayPal as a payment method and, in that case, it would be enough to send an ad hoc email to be able to steal your account and drain all your money via linked payment methods.

Also in this case, beyond the graphics with which Windows Mail has loaded the email, it is easy to understand that it is not a truthful email simply from the sender’s email address. In fact, such emails can only arrive from Paypal itself and not from third-party accounts.

This means that if I had clicked on the link in the email to accept the payment, I would have had to enter my Paypal access data on some strange web page made ad hoc, thus giving direct access to some malicious person (also in this case check always the web address present in the browser bar).

These are just a few cases, but there are many others. From the parcel blocked in a certain city to problems with the post office account up to the incredible offers of Amazon. But how to protect yourself from all this? Just always check all the information relating to the contact form which we receive a message or an email as well as the content of it and, in the case of WhatsApp, Facebook or any other social platform, report the relative account.

On WhatsApp, it is also possible to set the privacy for your profile photo on My contacts, so as to make it inaccessible to third-party contacts. Also, if something goes wrong, reporting it to the police could be helpful in tracing the user of the phone number.

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