WhatsApp has issued an urgent warning to its 2 billion+ users to ignore and block messages from a fishy account in the disguise of support accounts. It has been realized that there is a scam on the app that lures people in and asks them to disclose their private information.
Â
The fraudsters are using profile pictures so that they look verified and official, however, the differentiation is easily visible as the real account will have a green verified tick adjacent to its name whereas the fake one doesn’t have.
Â
The WhatsApp team has shared a couple of pictures comparing a real WhatsApp support interaction and a duplicate one and said, “This is the case of a user from my Discord Server, shimon128. After receiving a suspicious message from a WhatsApp account that pretended to be from WhatsApp Support, he reported the contact because it was a fake account that wanted to steal some information.”
Â
They went on to explain and elaborate on how to ensure if you are indeed in interaction with a verified account on WhatsApp. It further elaborated that a genuine verified account will never seek information pertaining to credit cards or two-step verification process or any personal confidential data.
Â
The fraudster will ask for a six-digit verification code to access the account and even asks for the details of the user’s credit card. The Meta-owned company has requested users to refrain from sharing any kind of financial information and report them. It is suggested to ignore any such message and delete the text as soon as possible.
Â
To avoid getting scammed from these kinds of frauds, there is an option to block and report the fraudster within WhatsApp, which will alert the backend WhatsApp support team about the issue. The history of the last five messages will then be shared with the moderation team so that they can investigate and remove the fraud account from its platform.
