WhatsApp account hijacked; people duped of thousands of dollars

A new scam seems to have surfaced in Hong Kong where a group of people, hailing from Taiwan, seem to have conned several WhatsApp users by hijacking their accounts and sending out messages to their contacts. And under this scam, more than 60 people have been cheated in the past three months.

When the police took to investigating the case, it revealed that the cons acted as friends on the chat app spoke to their contacts into revealing their account’s verification codes before sending messages to people on their contact lists. It is also being suspected that the Facebook accounts of victims have been accessed to collect their information.

The victims also reportedly said that their WhatsApp accounts were disabled and had to be set up again. A verification code was sent out to the phones and they victims were asked to forward it to their contacts as well.

A source from the police commented on this issue to say, “Con artists accessed the WhatsApp accounts with the verification codes and they posed as the genuine users and sent text to people on the contact lists to deceive them. The account holders were unable to use WhatsApp for up to 12 hours after their accounts were hijacked.”

These kinds of scams are not just restricted to Hong Kong but cons around the world are also targeting people through other platforms like WeChat.