No, the WhatsApp technical service has not sent you a message to warn you about an alleged illegitimate login to your account. This is a new scam – another one – that has been spreading throughout the last few days through the conversations of the most widely used messaging app on the planet, mainly among those of Spanish-speaking users.
This is indicated in a tweet published by the WABetaInfo portal, in which they explain that the message that many users have recently received does not come from an official WhatsApp account, but rather it is an attempted scam, the origin of which is, for now, unknown.
A new scam tries to get hold of your WhatsApp verification code
In the message in question, available in the image inserted in the tweet below these lines, the user is told that “a WhatsApp account with its number has recently been registered”, and that “it cannot be determined if the login is legitimate”. The message comes from a UK prefixed telephone number.
Subsequently, they claim to have sent a request for identity verification and ask the user for the code received by SMS, or otherwise, the account would be suspended, supposedly.
The clues that confirm that it is a totally false message are clear. First, when WhatsApp sends a warning message to a user through a chat – which, incidentally, happens in very special circumstances and is not at all frequent – a color verification indicator appears green next to the account name. On the other hand, details such as the fact that, in the first paragraph, “WhatsApp” is spelled incorrectly – “Whatsapp” -, makes it clear again that this is a fraudulent message.
Beyond that, WhatsApp itself indicates in its frequently asked questions section that the verification code received by SMS should never be shared with other people and that it should only be started to associate our WhatsApp account with a new device during the process initial configuration. In the event of receiving a verification code without having requested it, most likely, someone has entered our number when logging into WhatsApp, either by mistake or maliciously in order to seize control of our account.
In this sense, in addition, WhatsApp points out that the company does not have enough information to identify the person who is trying to log in to our account, something that would greatly make it difficult to recover a stolen account for having shared a verification code with a third party.
In short: if you receive a message similar to the one in the previous image, it is best to ignore it completely. It is also recommended to report and block the account, with the goal that WhatsApp will decide to suspend it indefinitely sooner or later.