A message sent via SMS inviting you to renew your subscription to WhatsApp: if you click on the link a virus will be installed on your smartphone
Scams continue to rage on WhatsApp with users poor sacrificial victims. The operation is always the same: a message received on the smartphone, the request to press on a link to activate some special feature on WhatsApp and you find yourself the smartphone blocked by some virus.
This time the scammers have chosen as the subject of their deception an evergreen: WhatsApp paid. To give news is the Facebook page “Commissariato di PS Online – Italia” that has published an image with the incriminated message. The text of the SMS received by a user is similar to that of previous scams: “Your WhatsApp Messenger account has expired. Registration has not been renewed expires within 24 hours, to renew your WhatsApp Messenger 0.99 euros, thanks to follow the renewal link Verification. Please renew as soon as possible to avoid losing all the media on the application.”
How to recognize the scam
Logically it is a scam and it is also quite easy to recognize it. First of all, WhatsApp is free and if it ever becomes paid, it will be directly the staff of the application to warn the user through an official message on the site. In addition, in the message there are obvious grammatical errors, a clear sign that this is a scam.
How to defend yourself from the scam
Do not click on the link for any reason. This is the first piece of advice you should follow to defend yourself against WhatsApp scam. In fact, in case we accidentally open the link, it is very likely that a virus would be installed on our smartphone, sending the device into lockdown. If we had not ended up in the network of a ransomware virus, the alternative could be an adware, a virus that tracks our online habits and sells them to companies to make custom advertisements.
Also, to defend ourselves from this type of scams, it will be enough to simply delete the message and block the number that sent it.