14 DAY TRIAL // With over 800 million users, WhatsApp communication platform has become one the preferred targets for cybercriminals; and it appears that any piece of news, fake or not, makes for good bait.
Recently, messages sent through the service lured recipients with a bogus report that a blue version of the application exists, and it can be obtained by following a given link.
Fake verification make scam more credible
Users that fall for the trick are taken to a website that asks for the phone number and then claims to run a fake number verification process that displays different stages of progress.
This step is designed to give confidence to the victim that the offer is real, but the behavior is the same, regardless of the input in the field intended for numerical characters.
Once this stage completes, the user has to go through another verification, which finishes almost instantly and requires to invite at least 10 active friends or three groups, Hoax-Slayer reports, with the obvious purpose of distributing the scam to as many people as possible.
The fraudulent page exhibits the same behavior whether WhatsApp is installed or not, but in the latter case the fake message cannot be shared with friends.
No blue version of WhatsApp
As expected, getting past this step does not provide the blue variant of WhatsApp; instead, the victim is presented a set of online surveys to complete, which ask for personal information, advertising another lure: the possibility to win a cool prize.
This, and probably collecting the phone numbers, is the end goal of the scam because the crooks make money from the surveys and also sell victim’s personal details to marketers.
The same type of deceit ran a few weeks ago, but victims were enticed with the promise of the WhatsApp video call feature. Fortunately, major browsers now flag that page for phishing and block access.