While social media platforms like Facebook are battling a massive data breach, popular messaging platform WhatsApp is the victim of a notorious scam. Hackers are trying to hold user accounts hostage. What’s more, they are using trusted contacts, such as a family member or a friend’s accounts, to hack into WhatsApp accounts? So today, we want to highlight this new kind of WhatsApp scam so be aware if you witness similar activity on your user account.
Discovered by writer and speaker Alexis Conran (tweet), a new WhatsApp scam is currently spreading on the platform, and it hacks user accounts using their contacts. Confused? Well, let me clear it out for you.
Here is how the new WhatsApp scam works. First, you will receive an SMS stating a random log-in OTP from WhatsApp. Now, if you did not know, WhatsApp does not use passwords or PINs for user logins. Instead, it sends a One Time Password (OTP) to the users’ phone numbers to identify them.
Share the word with as many people as you can. If you fall in a similar situation, do not send the OTP to your contact right away. First, call your contact’s phone number and inform them about the scam. Moreover, as soon as your contact logs back into their WhatsApp account, it will automatically kick out the hacker.
