This scam is worrying the authorities in the United Kingdom, and you should know about it, because it is likely that it will also arrive in Spain in the next few days.
WhatsApp is still the most popular messaging app in the world, and not only does it make it easy for all of our friends, coworkers, or family members to be using the app as well, but cybercriminals use the platform to deliver a series of hoaxes, usually using social engineering. .
There are many scams that are happening every day on WhatsApp, but one that seems to be gaining quite a bit, at least in the United Kingdom, in the scam of the family member or friend in need.
As its name suggests, the scam of the friend or relative in need is when a cybercriminal impersonates one of our known contacts to ask us for money claiming that he is in financial trouble or in the hospital to pay a bill.
In this case, cybercriminals pass themselves off as grandchildren or children, whose accounts have previously been stolen, to deceive older people, parents or grandparents who are not so used to this type of technological scams and who fall very easily into the trap .
Given the increase in cases, WhatsApp has wanted to announce this scam in the UK because 59% of British users have suffered a scam attempt with these types of messages.
Specifically, they speak of a 75-year-old man who transferred 1,550 pounds to scammers thinking that it was his granddaughter, who faked a false medical bill.
On the other hand, the WhatsApp policy manager, Kathryn Harnett, has indicated that the application “protects users’ personal messages with end-to-end encryption but we want to remind people that we all have a role to play in keeping our accounts secure by staying vigilant against the threat of scammers”.
Another pretty common scam is account hijackings. Cybercriminals ask for a sequence of several digits that the victim has received by SMS claiming that they have got the wrong number. If the victim provides them with this sequence of digits (the account verification), they lose the account.
The user must be especially careful and never provide any personal information, nor any security digits that they have received on their phone to other people, even if they are apparently friends or family.