WhatsApp Gold: A supposedly premium version of WhatsApp was spammed to millions of users throughout 2016.Many famous WhatsApp scams of the last few years have used this form of spam, notably:

Click on the link at your peril it's going to try and illicit your personal details, banking details, login credentials, or any other form of data that has value on the dark web.

Scams and Suspicious LinksĪ huge part of WhatsApp spam has a single purpose-to try and make you open a link in the message. The sender will not be able to determine whether your account is even active. Sure, you'll occasionally get a random WhatsApp message from an unrecognized number that turns out to be a buddy who's changed numbers, but most of the time, they will be spam.Īlthough it is not a foolproof approach, one way to discourage some people from sending you unsolicited messages is to hide your WhatsApp status. It's highly unlikely you'll ever have such a sender in your address book, which means that when it lands in your WhatsApp inbox, it will always show as an unrecognized number. That means that the senders of spam can scrape the web for contact details, buy lists of active numbers from the dark web, and even hack other services that have your phone number on file, then send you an unsolicited message. WhatsApp lets you send a message to anyone whose phone number you have. The distinction is important: if a message has been forwarded more than five times, it's almost always going to be a form of spam-whether that's yet another boring meme that's doing the rounds, fake news, or something more sinister.

You'll also see a small warning on the message box itself, letting you know that the message has been 'forwarded many times.' When a message has been forwarded five times, you'll see a double arrow icon rather than the single arrow that denotes a typical forwarded message. However, users might be less aware that WhatsApp has a separate indicator for frequently-forwarded messages. Most WhatsApp users will be aware that the app lets you forward messages received from one person directly to another recipient (for those who didn't know, long-press a message and tap the forward option on the pop-up menu that appears). Here are our top ways to spot WhatsApp spam, along with some advice on what steps you should take if you receive such a message. So what does WhatsApp spam look like? What can you do about it? And how do you block a contact on WhatsApp? How to Recognize WhatsApp Spam

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